The CRU graph. Note that it
is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny
amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The
horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole
graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees
-- thus showing ZERO warming

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in
many people that causes them to delight in going without material
comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people --
with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many
Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct
too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they
have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an
ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us
all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Dissecting Leftism. For a list of backups viewable at times when the main blog is "down", see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************

29 April, 2016

Munshi nails it again

Jamal Munshi is a very bright and very skeptical climate
scientist. He must have tenure or wouldn't get away with it. His
latest paper is a new study of radiocarbon levels -- which shows that
the increase in atmospheric CO2 is NOT the result of human
activity. Beat that!

Dilution of Atmospheric Radiocarbon Co2 by Fossil Fuel Emissions

Jamal Munshi

Abstract:

Post bomb period data for 14C in atmospheric carbon dioxide from seven
measurement stations are available in small samples up to and including
the year 2007. They do not support the theory that dilution by 14C-free
fossil fuel emissions is responsible for falling levels of 14C in
atmospheric CO2. We find instead that the observed decline of 14C in
atmospheric CO2 is consistent with the exponential decay of bomb 14C. We
also find that the attribution to fossil fuel emissions of the pre-bomb
dilution of 14C in atmospheric CO2 in the period 1900-1950 found by
Stuiver and Quay in tree-ring data is inconsistent with total emissions
and changes in atmospheric CO2 during that period. We conclude that the
data for 14C in atmospheric CO2 do not serve as empirical evidence that
the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution
is attributable to fossil fuel emissions.

One of the most enduring lies from the Greenies is that "sustainable"
power will save you money in the long run. They figure that only
by making most unrealistic assumptions, usually ignoring maintenance
costs, for instance. But reality does catch up and the promised
savings turn into costs. The latest example below

Lake Land College recently announced plans to tear down broken wind
turbines on campus, after the school got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support
for wind power.

The turbines were funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S.
Department of Labor, but the turbines lasted for less than four years
and were incredibly costly to maintain.

“Since the installation in 2012, the college has spent $240,000 in parts
and labor to maintain the turbines,” Kelly Allee, Director of Public
Relations at Lake Land College, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make
the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning
and likely suffered electrical damage last summer. School officials’
original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in
electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated.
Under the original optimistic scenario, the turbines would have to last
for 22.5 years just to recoup the costs, not accounting for inflation.
If viewed as an investment, the turbines had a return of negative 99.14
percent.

“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have
only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,” she said. “One of
the reasons for the lower than expected energy power is that the
turbines often need to be repaired. They are not a good teaching tool if
they are not working.”

The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make
the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning
and likely suffered electrical damage last summer.

Even though the college wants to tear down one of the turbines, they are
federal assets and “there is a process that has to be followed”
according to Allee.

The turbines became operational in 2012 after a 5-year long building
campaign intended to reduce the college’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions
to fight global warming. Even though the turbines cost almost $1
million, but the college repeatedly claimed they’d save money in the
long run.

“It is becoming more and more difficult for us financially to maintain
the turbines,” Josh Bullock, the college’s president, told the Journal
Gazette and Times-Courier last week. “I think it was an extremely worthy
experiment when they were installed, but they just have not performed
to our expectations to this point.”

Bullock states that the turbines simply haven’t been able to power the
campus’ buildings and that most of the electricity wasn’t effectively
used.

Lake Land plans to replace the two failed turbines with a solar power
system paid for by a government grant. “[T]he photovoltaic panels are
expected to save the college between $50,000 and $60,000 this
year,”Allee told the DCNF.

Globally, less than 30 percent of total power wind capacity is actually
utilized as the intermittent and irregular nature of wind power makes it
hard to use.Power demand is relatively predictable, but the output of a
wind turbine is quite variable over time and generally doesn’t coincide
with the times when power is most needed. Thus, wind power systems
require conventional backups to provide power during outages. Since the
output of wind turbines cannot be predicted with high accuracy by
forecasts, grid operators need to keep excess conventional power systems
running.

Wind power accounted for only 4.4 percent of electricity generated in
America in 2014, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Another recent study dispels the spirited, scaremonger-filled claim that
fracking pollutes water supplies. But you probably haven’t heard one
iota about it is because the ecofascist lobby wanted it buried.
According to University of Cincinnati in Carroll’s Dr. Amy
Townsend-Small, who spearheaded a years-long study on the effects of
fracking on water reservoirs, “We haven’t seen anything to show that
wells have been contaminated by fracking.” Townsend-Small made these
remarks in February at a Carroll County Concerned Citizens in Carrollton
gathering. But here’s the kicker.

At the same meeting, she gave a remarkably candid explanation for why
the study won’t be made publicly available: “I am really sad to say
this, but some of our funders, the groups that had given us funding in
the past, were a little disappointed in our results. They feel that
fracking is scary and so they were hoping this data could be a reason to
ban it.” Give her props for honesty. Keep in mind, the study was
partially taxpayer subsidized. Remember that next time a government
official mentions “settled science.” It’s easy to find a consensus when
you cherry the pick data to comport with a narrative.

Fracking is greener and more financially beneficial than alternate
methods. This coupled with the aforementioned new research has National
Center for Public Policy Research fellow Jeff Stier asking, “Why Are
They Hiding the Good News About Fracking?” As he points out, “Back in
2011 … former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted that there hasn’t
been a ‘proven case where the fracking process itself has affected
water.’ Two years later, current EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy
affirmed Jackson’s remark, stating, ‘I am not aware of any definitive
determinations that would contradict those statements.’”

If only they’d actually look. “The University of Cincinnati’s fracking
research further establishes what myriad studies have already shown:
Concerns about groundwater contamination are baseless,” Stier concludes.
Meanwhile, here’s another question: Why are greenies opposed to a
greener world brought on by increased CO2, anyway? At the very least,
Americans should be wondering why groups that once supported natural gas
— like the Sierra Club — are suddenly trying to shut down the industry
even though science supports it. They know they’re wrong — which is why
they want to silence and criminalize climate dissenters. Who are the
crooks again?

Current U.S. law prevents the United States from forking over money to a
United Nations organization if a group that is not an officially
recognized state is also a member. And while it may seem like the rule
splits hairs, there’s good reason for it. As The Hill explains, the rule
was established so that the Palestinians can’t pull a foreign policy
fast one and leverage the UN to declare statehood without first sitting
down and negotiating a lasting peace deal with Israel. But peace in the
Middle East isn’t as important to Barack Obama as cementing a legacy of
climate change policies that pander to ecofascists.

Senate Republicans point out that the U.S. cannot give $10 million a
year to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because
the Palestinian Authority also signed onto the framework. But as the
whole climate change treaty wasn’t a treaty when Obama didn’t want to
try winning approval from the Senate, Obama says the organization the
treaty established is not an organization. “The UNFCCC is a treaty, and
the Palestinians' purported accession does not involve their becoming
members of any UN specialized agency or, indeed, any international
organization,” State Department spokesman John Kirby argued. “Further,
we do not believe that it advances U.S. interests to respond to
Palestinian efforts by withholding critical funds that support the
implementation of key international agreements, which could undermine
our ability to pursue important U.S. objectives.” See? The ends justify
the means.

But Obama’s arguments don’t hold water, according to The Heritage
Foundation’s Brett Schaefer and Steven Groves. The two wrote that UNFCCC
is an organization established by the treaty — one that employs about
500 people, similar to organizations like INTERPOL. As a result,
Congress should exercise its power of the purse and pull the strings
shut on this implementation of Obama’s ecofascist plan.

Welsh village to sue government over 'alarmist' rising sea level claim

A Welsh village is to sue the government after a climate change report
suggested their community would soon be washed away by rising sea
levels. The document says Fairbourne will soon be lost to the sea,
and recommends that it is "decommissioned".

Angry villagers say predictions of that the sea level will rise by a
metre a year are alarmist, and have hit house prices and investment in
the village.

At a local meeting they voted overwhelmingly in favour of pursuing legal
action over the controversial Shoreline Management Plan 2 (SMP2),
saying it had "blighted" their community.

The plan for Fairbourne, in Gwynedd, surrounded by the Snowdonia
National Park, was commissioned by Pembrokeshire and Gwynedd local
authorities and signed off by the Welsh Government. It is not yet clear
who would foot the bill should the legal campaign be successful.

Currently, Fairbourne is included in the West of Wales (SMP2) which
recommends that, while the village will be protected against flooding
over the next few years, in the longer term, as sea levels rise, it will
undergo "managed realignment" and Farbourne will eventually be
"decommissioned".

As a result, house prices in Fairbourne have plummeted and businesses have struggled for long-term investment.

The SMP2 plan states that Fairbourne will see sea levels rise by one
metre in the next century, but Fairbourne Facing Change (FFC), a
community action group looking to sustain the coastal village for as
long as possible, has always dismissed this data as misleading.

The chairman of FFC, Pete Cole, said: "There are four Shoreline
Management Plans for Wales, two of which, including the one covering
Fairbourne, used the more aggressive sea level rise predictions of one
metre in 100 years.

"The other two used more optimistic forecasts. If these had been used in
Fairbourne the timeline would have been extended by many years.

The SMP2 plan states that Fairbourne will see sea levels rise by one metre in the next century

"It's ridiculous that had Fairbourne been separated by two different
SMPs, one side of the village would be a metre under water 30 to 40
years before the other half - it's nonsensical.

"The 2016 sea level rise forecast produced by the esteemed National
Tidal and Sea Level Facility concluded that sea levels could be
exp¬ected to rise 50cm rather than one metre in the next 100 years and
with only a modest 20 to 30cm rise in the next 50 years.

"FFC has never accepted the predictions used for our SMP2. Latest scientific evidence proves that we were right."

Seeking 'legal redress', FFC and Fairbourne are hoping to claim back the
original value of all the properties and businesses in Fairbourne
following the "enormously damaging" claims put forward by the SMP.

"We have been hurt by the actions of the agencies who adopted these plans without thinking of the ramifications," added Mr Cole.

"Serious questions should be asked about the 'due diligence' of these
bodies which are overseeing a system which is not consistent across the
whole of the country.

"A barrister from Gray's Inn Square Chambers in London, specialising in
the fields of planning and local government law, has reviewed our
situation and concludes that there could be a potential claim. "We could
be looking at a substantial return, tens of millions, but perhaps even
£100 million.

"The barrister has offered to undertake the legal work on a fixed-fee basis of around £20,000.

"Public meetings held on Friday, 5 February, agreed overwhelmingly to
personally commit to contribute to the funding covering legal costs and
that FFC would ask the barrister to proceed with the initial review and
application of those facts to the law.

"We have already raised a four-figure sum towards the legal fees, almost a 10th of the amount required."

It's Greenies doing what Greenies do and compromise is unknown to
them. But if drilling is to be banned there, drilling is
impermissible anywhere. For most of the length of the bight (over
1,000 kilometers), the land adjoining the Bight is basically
desert. There's nothing there. So virtually no people to
endanger in any way. The land concerned is not called the
Nullarbor plain for nothing. Most people seem to think it is an
Aboriginal name but it is in fact Latin -- meaning "No
trees". That's how barren it is.

And the
minimal runoff from the land means that there is not much to encourage
life in the seas there either. There will of course be marine life
feeding off marine algae and the like but there is no reason to think
any of it is unique, let alone importantly unique. All deserts
have creatures in them at low densities so the Greenies can claim that
creatures on land and sea there are "endangered" but that is just a
reflex. Nobody that I know has shown that there are in fact unique
creatures there, let along importantly unique ones. No doubt there are
whales etc there but are there any whales there that are not found
elswhere? Even the Greenies have not yet claimed that

So if
exploration even in a desert area is impermissible, where is it
permisible? To Greenies NO oil exploration or new production is
permissible but less obsessed people do not have to agree

When executives of the global oil giant BP fronted the company’s general
meeting in London this month they knew they faced ­plenty of upset
shareholders.

The mop-up from the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico had just eaten up another $US20 billion ($25bn) of
shareholder funds in a major legal settlement, and collapsing world oil
prices had smashed the company’s full year profit, causing an investor
revolt over an executive bonus scheme that seemed completely at odds
with the financial performance.

But when the most senior BP executives faced investors, the level of
hostility towards an oil ­exploration project 16,000km away took them by
surprise.

“Gosh, this investment in Australia is not very popular today,” BP chief
executive Bob Dudley said. But he couldn’t see why all the fuss. “The
country had an area and invited people to participate in a bid,’’ Dudley
said. “We do this around the world in exploration; ­it is not a
particularly unusual or harsh area.”

BP’s plans, along with rival oil giants, to drill for oil in the Great
Australian Bight is highly contentious, but the potential rewards — up
to 1.9 billion barrels of oil worth up to $110bn (at today’s depressed
prices) are great. But so are the risks. It could be the next Bass
Strait, enthusiastic backers claim. Or it could be the next Deepwater
Horizon disaster, passionate ­opponents warn.

At the general meeting, BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg emphasised that
the company was not trying to pressure governments. “To run Bight or
not run Bight is not a decision for BP,” he said. “It is a ­decision for
Australia.”

Now, as BP plans a $1bn exploration program and a $US750 million
drilling rig nears completion in a South Korean shipbuilding yard, the
federal Senate is taking a very keen interest.

Today, a Senate inquiry holds its first public hearings, hoping to
determine how the contentious drilling permits were issued and
administered and whether the great risks in drilling in such a
­hazardous environment as the Great Australian Bight were properly
assessed.

The Bight drilling program is at a very early stage but is vigorously
touted as being the next Bass Strait: an area containing billions of
dollars worth of oil reserves that could transform Australia from a net
importer of crude oil into an exporter.

For risk-hungry explorers it represents one of the world’s great
unexplored deepwater oil regions, similar in potential to that of the
Niger and Mississippi deltas. Major oil companies, led by BP, Statoil,
Chevron and Santos, are lining up for a piece of the action.

But the calamitous events six years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, when an
explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon well killed 11 wor­kers, spewed 4.9
million barrels of oil into the ocean, killing countless wildlife,
ruining fisheries and decimating local communities, mean that the Great
Australian Bight drilling plans have put environmental groups on high
alert.

Leading environmental groups have spent many months war gaming a major
confrontation with BP over its Great Australian Bight plans. The
campaign dovetails into a broader agenda to limit fossil fuel
developments, most particularly in new frontier and ­potentially
difficult areas like ­Alaska and deepwater targets such as the Great
Australian Bight.

BP says in its submission to the federal Senate inquiry, it wants the
matter concluded quickly “given the Senate has taken the unusual step of
specifically naming our company and its proposed investments in
Australia”.

Global oil and gas production will keep rising over the next two
decades, it says, to help meet world demand for primary energy. It
points out that Australia has produced oil since the 1960s with a
history of drilling in Commonwealth Marine Areas, including the Great
Australian Bight. And Australia is a net oil importer, as consumption
keeps rising despite domestic oil production steadily falling. The whole
nation would benefit from the discovery of a new oil or gas region, and
not just through tax and other macro­economic benefits, BP says.

“Wood Mackenzie, an independent oil and gas analytical firm, estimates
the potential resource in the Great Australian Bight to be 1900mmboe
(million barrels of oil equivalent) of oil — more than 20 times the
entire ­Australian production in 2014,” BP’s Senate submission says. “A
new oilfield development could make a material difference to the balance
of payments — and to tax revenues.”

Ironically, BP was granted special tax arrangements over its Great
Australian Bight exploration program and can deduct 150 per cent of
costs from its royalty obligations. But in response to publicity about
the tax arrangements, the company said it “considers transparency an
important requirement to increasing trust in tax systems around the
world”. The company told an earlier Senate hearing into tax avoidance
that BP Australia’s effective tax rate had averaged 28.4 per cent over
the past five years with income tax payments alone exceeding $2.2bn.

Given the company’s recent history in the Gulf of Mexico, however, it is
not tax matters that concentrate the minds of environ­mental groups.

The Great Australian Bight is an “extra­ordinary ocean and coastal
environment of global conservation significance”, the Wilderness
­Society says in its Senate inquiry submission. “It is remote, wild and
pristine, with more local marine life diversity than the Great Barrier
Reef.

“While scientists are still trying to understand the diverse eco­logical
values of the Bight, we know already that it is a major haven for
whales, including the threatened southern right whale, and home to other
significant ­marine wildlife such as the Aus­tralian sea lion, giant
cuttlefish, dolphins, great white sharks and a vast array of seabirds.
All of this life and ­immense natural beauty supports thriving fishing
and ­tourism ­industries and a uniquely Australian way of life for the
many ­coastal communities of the Bight.”

Both sides are haunted by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. ­According to
BP, if the Bight was hit by a worst-case scenario — a loss of control of
the well resulting in uncontrolled flow of petroleum into the ocean,
“oil would take ­several weeks to reach shore and the direction in which
it could drift ­varies due to seasonal differences in current and wind
direction”.

But the Wilderness Society says an oil spill from a deep-sea well
blowout could close fisheries in the Bight, Bass Strait and even the
Tasman Sea while even a low-flow oil spill could affect all of southern
Australia’s coast, from Western Australia right across to Victoria
through Bass Strait and around Tasmania.

BP aims to begin exploratory drilling in October and has a $US750m harsh
environment, semi-­submersible oil drilling rig nearly completed in
South Korea and ready to ship to the Bight.

The Senate has a fortnight to investigate but given the looming federal
election, it is feasible the Senate may not finish the task. The inquiry
terms of reference call for an assessment of the potential
environmental, social and economic impacts of BP’s plans, including the
risks of something going wrong.

Submissions to the inquiry ­include local councils and fishing groups.
The city of Victor Harbor thinks the risk of an oil spill within the
Bight may be low but the ­consequences potentially catastrophic. It
points out that the Bight is a pristine environment and a critical
sanctuary for many threatened species that support two significant
industries: fishing and tourism.

The South Australian Oyster Growers Association says it does not want to
block potentially beneficial oil projects for the Eyre Peninsula and
South Australia. But drilling for oil does pose a “significant risk to
the currently pristine unpolluted environment and the image of this”.

“These are the features that our reputation and credentials in the
marketplace are based upon, and have taken decades to ­establish and
promote,” the association says.

Then there’s damning evidence by the world’s foremost engineering
disaster expert, Bob Bea. Bea, nicknamed the “Master of Disaster”,
criticises BP, saying there is not “sufficient information to determine
if BP has properly ­assessed the risks”.

“The information that has been presented indicates that BP has
apparently integrated the key ­aspects of what has been learned about
drilling in high-risk environments,” Bea says. “However, the information
is not available to ­determine if BP has properly assessed and managed
the risks ­associated with an uncontrolled loss of well control.”

Bea, professor emeritus at the Centre for Catastrophic Risk Management,
University of California-Berkeley, has worked for more than 55 years on
offshore oil and gas industry operations in 72 countries.

The American ­Society of Mechanical Engineers journal says: “If Robert
Bea turns up on your project, it’s not a good sign. Either you’re in the
middle of a major disaster or someone is worried enough to send out the
­nation’s foremost forensic engineer to take a look.”

The Wilderness Society says BP has admitted containment booms and
skimmers will not work in the Bight and that the area is “right on the
edge of” the reach of helicopters. But of major concern is the level of
secrecy ­imposed by the government-­sanctioned ­appro­v­ing authority,
which has all of the environmental powers of the federal government over
the offshore exploration area including endangered and listed marine
species.

The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management
Authority is an ­independent statutory authority that is the national
regulator for health and safety, well integrity and environmental
management for offshore oil and gas activities in Australian waters.

Green groups demand that BP release its environmental plan and that the
federal government assemble an independent expert panel to look at oil
drilling in the Bight. They claim NOPSEMA does not have necessary
environmental expertise. “While we know the Bight is a pristine marine
environment with at least 36 species of whales and dolphins, there is
still much we don’t know as the GAB Research Project, which BP has
partly funded, won’t report until mid-2017,” a Wilderness Society
spokesman says.

The Wilderness Society is ­demanding a transparent process. “Instead, we
have an Environment Minister who has handed off his responsibility to
protect the environment to a poorly known regulator; one running a
highly flawed and opaque process that fails to ensure the protection of
our environment or properly assess the cumulative impacts of all
potential oil development in the Great Australian Bight.”

BP is no doubt banking on the Senate inquiry falling victim to the
electoral cycle. It wants to start drilling in October and the federal
government has delegated the ­decision to its regulator.

In its own Senate submission, NOPSEMA says a final decision on the BP
plans for the Bight is yet to be made. It notes that two statutory
independent reviews found NOPSEMA to be a “robust, rigorous and
competent regulator”.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

28 April, 2016

Percentage of Americans Who Identify as 'Environmentalists' Down 36 Points Since 1991

A Gallup poll released on Friday shows that the number of Americans who
identify as environmentalists has dropped 36 points, from 78 percent in
1991 to 42 percent in 2016. There has also been a decline in Americans
expressing concern about environmental problems, such as pollution.

The Earth Day poll is conducted annually by Gallup. The polling firm
cites the politicization of environmental issues as one possible reason
for the decline, highlighting the growing partisan gap in those who
identify as environmentalists.

A large percentage of Americans (Republicans and Democrats) – 78 percent
– considered themselves environmentalists in 1991. That number today is
42 percent.

Also, only 27 percent of Republicans identify as environmentalists,
compared with 56 percent of Democrats, a partisan gap of 29 percentage
points.

However, Gallup notes the “broader decline in personal environmentalism
at the same time that the environment has turned into more of a
Democratic than Republican issue,” citing the large decline in Democrats
who consider themselves environmentalists -- 56 percent today versus 78
percent 25 years ago.

Gallup also notes a decline in Americans’ concern over environmental
problems, such as air pollution and pollution of rivers, lakes and
reservoirs. Concern over polluted drinking water is down from 65 percent
in 1989-1990 to 61 percent today.

Concern over air pollution is down from 61 percent to just 43 percent today.

While concern over climate change has risen slightly (from 33 percent to
37 percent) since 1990, Gallup notes that, “on a relative basis, global
warming is still of less concern than most of the other problems.”

Gallup’s poll results are based on telephone interviews conducted March
2-6, 2016, with a random sample of 1,019 adults, aged 18 and older.

Snow and sleet has fallen in many parts of the UK as temperatures
struggle to get into double figures with the prospect of a Spring-like
May a long way off.

Despite the time of year, forecasters are warning the unsettled picture
will continue for much of the week with freezing conditions in many
parts.

Thunder, lightning and sleet showers are expected with some in northern
areas witnessing heavy snowfall, including on the North Yorkshire Moors
and parts of Scotland.

The blizzard seen all over the UK were reminiscent of the bizarre scenes
on the very same day 35 years ago, when snowstorms hit the British
spring.

Cars were buried on the roads as the nation was blanketed in a thick
layer of snow on April 26 1981, which saw the worst blizzards for that
time of year in a century.

Yesterday's downfall was the latest widespread snow has been seen in the
UK since May 6, 1997, when more than 200 weather stations recorded it.

Before that forecasters have to go back to April 27, 1985 when several London weather stations recorded sleet.

Snow even stopped play at The Oval cricket ground this afternoon as the south was dusted in the white stuff.

The type of snow flurry seen in London is known as 'thundersnow'. It is a
phenomenon caused by heavy showers accompanied by lightning storms.

Forecasters think parts of Britain will be colder than Siberia and
Greenland this week. There is a strong risk of hail showers throughout
the country, with a chance of snow settling down to 200 metres.

A few years ago, Hal Willis, a scientist from the University of
California, Santa Barbara, resigned from the American Physical Society
after 67 years as a member. Why? He cited the global warming/climate
change issue and the blind allegiance to global warming theory by so
many of the Society’s members, as well as the organization’s failure to
challenge these members in the name of true scientific investigation.
Moreover, he noted that billions of dollars of research funding is a
major reason the practice of true science on climate change has been
replaced by ideological advocacy.

Of the climate change issue Willis said, “It is the greatest
pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a scientist.” His
position has support from other scientists, among them Dr. Ivar Giaever,
a 1973 Nobel Prize-Winner for physics.

Giaever joined more than 70 Nobel Science Laureates in signing an open
letter in October 2008 expressing strong support for then-presidential
candidate Barack Obama, who had proclaimed that “no challenge poses a
greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Seven years
later, Giaever believes Obama’s warning was a “ridiculous statement.” He
told a Nobel forum last July, “I would say that basically global
warming is a non-problem.”

Dr. Richard Lindzen is emeritus professor of Atmospheric Sciences at
MIT. Citing the growing shrillness of the cries about “global warming”
during his 30 years there, during which time he says “the climate has
changed remarkably little,” he notes that the less the climate changes,
the louder the warnings of climate catastrophe become.

In a recent video presentation for Prager University, Lindzen asserts
that participants in the climate change debate fall into one of three
groups:

Group One, he says, is associated with the scientific part of the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group 1),
and are scientists that generally believe recent climate change is due
to burning fossil fuels, which releases CO2 (carbon dioxide) and might
eventually dangerously harm the planet.

Group Two is made up of scientists who, like Lindzen, don’t see the
problem identified by Group One as an especially serious one. They say
there are many reasons why the climate changes — the sun, clouds,
oceans, the orbital variations of the Earth, as well as a myriad of
other inputs, none of which are fully understood.

Group Three is made up of politicians, environmentalists and the media.
Climate alarmism provides politicians money and power and
environmentalists also get money as well as confirmation of their
religious zealotry for the environment, while the issue satisfies the
media’s need for a cause to support, money and headlines. As Lindzen put
it, “Doomsday scenarios sell.”

From the climate alarmists' point of view, virtually every problem on
Earth stems from climate change — as Lindzen said, “everything from acne
to the Syrian civil war.”

The Director of the Center for Industrial Progress, and author of “The
Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” Alex Epstein, shows us in another Prager
University video presentation (complete with thorough sourcing for his
assertions) that burning fossil fuels has improved the lives of millions
in the developed world by helping solve their biggest environmental
challenges, purified their water and air, made their cities and homes
more sanitary and kept them safe from potential catastrophic climate
change.

Could we have built reservoirs, purification plants, and laid networks
of pipes to bring clean water to homes without fossil fuels, Epstein
asks? Fossil fuels can do the same for those in the developing world, if
the powers that be will allow it. More fossil fuel use equals more
clean water.

Epstein further shows that despite an increase in fossil fuel use from
1.5 billion tons in 1970 to around 2.0 billion tons in 2010, emissions
dropped from about 300 million tons to about 150 million tons during the
same period. This resulted from using anti-pollution technology powered
by … fossil fuels.

If CO2 emissions cause harmful changes in the environment, and if
emissions have increased, then more people must be suffering
“climate-related deaths,” due to things like droughts, floods, storms
and extreme temperatures. But no, Epstein said. “In the last 80 years,
as CO2 emissions have rapidly escalated, the annual rate of
climate-related deaths worldwide has rapidly declined — by 98%.”

“In sum,” Epstein said, “fossil fuels don’t take a naturally safe
environment and make it dangerous; they empower us to take a naturally
dangerous environment and make it cleaner and safer.”

That understanding gets to the heart of the disagreement.

A large segment of the public has bought into the “we are killing our
environment” idea put forth by the climate alarmists, and they now
meekly accept it when the United Nations and their own governments
advocate harmful solutions to climate change, ignoring the mounting pile
of contrary data. Consequently, the economic damage done to regions of
the U.S. and the thousands of American workers put in the unemployment
line by the foolish policies of the Obama administration basically are
considered necessary collateral damage.

A strong case has been made that fossil fuels aren’t significantly
harmful, and that they have been and will be extraordinarily helpful to
the people of the world, if only we will listen.

The Sierra Club has relentlessly, tirelessly and now successfully worked
to smother the coal industry. Consequently, the effects are being felt
in the form of higher energy bills. But if the Sierra Club gets its way,
prices at the pump could also skyrocket. And it’s all thanks to the
ecofascist group’s unnecessary disinformation campaign that’s now
looking to quell hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

Lena Moffitt, the director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign,
tells S&P Global Market Intelligence, “We have moved to a very
clear and firm and vehement position of opposing gas. Our board recently
passed a policy that we oppose any new gas-fired power plants. We also
have a policy opposing fracking on our books.” She added, “We are doing
everything we can to bring the same expertise that we brought to taking
down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on
gas in the same way.”

“That’s an amazing admission,” says Investor’s Business Daily, “given
that natural gas is a clean-burning fuel that is reducing greenhouse gas
emissions and real pollutants, too. There have been no reported cases
of water contamination from fracking technology, as even the Obama
administration has admitted.” Not to mention “the idea that America will
be 100% reliant on green energy is a deeply delusional and dangerous
fantasy. Even after more than $100 billion in government subsidies over
the past decade, wind and solar power are so expensive and unworkable
that they account for less than 4% of our energy supply. Is America
really expected to give up on the other 96%?”

It’s eerily demonstrative of what Rick Moran recently wrote concerning
Sanders' climate proposition: “His policies are not designed to deal
with energy as much as they’re supposed to impoverish us by reducing
output for reasons having nothing to do with generating electricity or
fueling our cars.”

Democrats once loved natural gas. As recently as 2012, the Obama
administration welcomed a future replete with liquefied natural gas. But
behind all the Democrats' philandering is a strategic ruse. Columnist
John Goodman makes an important insight when he writes, “We naturally
assume that that public policy advocates actually want to achieve the
things they advocate. But there are a lot of people both on the right
and the left — but especially on the left — for whom that probably isn’t
true. … Causes are vehicles to money and power.” Take away the cause,
and “the donations would dry up. The jobs would go away. The research
grants would vanish.”

Today, Democrats claim to hate natural gas. That’s probably because
their prerogative isn’t to solve anything — rather it’s to keep the
issues alive and milk them for all their political worth.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has launched a fierce
counter-attack against Claude Walker, the attorney general for the
Virgin Islands, who recently served a subpoena on CEI demanding
documents related to CEI’s research on global “climate change.”

On April 20, CEI’s attorney, Andrew Grossman, filed a long and extensive
objection to the subpoena and made it clear that CEI will not comply
with it. Grossman, a lawyer at BakerHostetler and co-founder of the Free
Speech in Science Project, told Walker in his cover letter that the
attorney general’s legal action targeting CEI is “a blatant attempt to
intimidate and harass an organization for advancing views that you
oppose.”

The only reason to try to force CEI to turn over its internal research
and documents on this issue is “to punish [CEI] for its public policy
views, chill its associations, and silence its advocacy.”

Grossman cites Walker’s own statements at the press conference held by
AGs United for Clean Power on March 29 to show that Walker launched this
investigation to achieve political ends, not “carry out any law
enforcement duty.”

Walker said his investigation was intended to “make it clear to our
residents as well as the American people that we have to do something
transformational” about climate change, stop “rely[ing] on fossil
fuels,” and “look at reliable energy.” As Grossman says, Walker is
entitled to his opinions on public policy, but Walker doesn’t have a
right to wield his “power as a prosecutor to advance a policy agenda by
persecuting those who disagree with” Walker.

The objection filed by Grossman on behalf of CEI not only points out the
constitutional problems with Walker’s investigation, but some crucial
procedural mistakes made by Walker. For example, Walker didn’t actually
get a court in the Virgin Islands to issue the subpoena; he simply
issued it himself.

Subpoenas that are not issued by a “court of record” and that are not
part of a “pending judicial action” cannot be domesticated in another
jurisdiction like the District of Columbia where CEI is located and was
served with the subpoena. This is the type of basic error that one might
expect from a young law firm associate, not the attorney general of a
U.S. protectorate.

But more fundamentally, CEI is objecting on First Amendment grounds,
citing to court cases prohibiting the compelled disclosure of the type
of information and documents that Walker is trying to obtain. Grossman
claims that the subpoena “violates the First Amendment because it
constitutes an attempt to silence and intimidate, as well as retaliate
against, speech espousing a particular viewpoint with which the Attorney
General disagrees.”

CEI asserts that the subpoena is also “invalid because the underlying
investigation is pretextual, is being undertaken in bad faith, is
intended as a fishing expedition, and is in support of an investigation
of charges that have no likelihood of success.”

In what may be a sign of the involvement of the plaintiffs’ bar in
pushing these climate change persecutions in the same way it helped
instigate the massive tobacco industry litigation, CEI says the subpoena
is invalid and violates the Fifth and 14th Amendments because Walker
has delegated “investigative and prosecutorial authority to private
parties.”

CEI is referring to the fact that Walker’s subpoena was handled by a
private law firm in Washington, D.C., Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll,
which has been called one of the “most feared plaintiffs’ firms” in the
country. The firm itself brags about being the “most effective law firm
in the United States for lawsuits with a strong social and political
component” (emphasis added).

CEI says that Walker’s investigation “could result in penalties
available only to government prosecutors.” Thus, delegating
“investigative and prosecutorial authority to a private attorney, Ms.
Linda Singer, and a private law firm, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll
PLLC, that are most likely being compensated on a contingency-fee basis,
violates due process of law.”

That raises a very interesting question about “AGs United for Clean
Power”—are they hiring private firms like Cohen Milstein on a
contingency basis to target climate change deniers?

CEI’s objection also claims that Walker, Singer, and the Cohen Milstein
firm may be subject to sanctions for violating a local court rule in the
District of Columbia that required them to “take reasonable steps to
avoid imposing undue burden or expense” on CEI, and that this broad,
burdensome subpoena “plainly violates that duty given its facial
invalidity, astonishing overbreadth, and evident purpose of imposing
unwarranted and illegitimate burdens on CEI and CEI’s exercise of its
constitutional rights.”

CEI says that Walker, Singer, and the firm “violated their ethical
obligations” under a D.C. Bar Rule that prohibits an attorney from
“knowingly us[ing] methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal
rights of” a third party.

CEI’s attorney concludes his letter to Walker by calling him (and all of
the other attorneys general involved in this climate change cartel) out
in very plain spoken terms: "Your demand on CEI is offensive, it is
un-American, it is unlawful, and it will not stand"

He gives Walker a warning and a choice: “You can either withdraw [the
subpoena] or expect to fight … the law does not allow government
officials to violate Americans’ civil rights with impunity.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

CONSUMERS like to believe we’re doing the right thing for the
environment. Purchasing plastic bags or coffee cups marked
“biodegradable”, “compostable” or even plain old “environmentally
friendly”, helps us sleep better at night.

But a new Senate inquiry into the threat of marine plastic pollution in
Australia has found that “biodegradable” plastic bags are just as bad as
regular plastic bags.

“While consumers might feel they are ‘doing the right thing’ by choosing
biodegradable or degradable plastic, these products simply disintegrate
into smaller and smaller pieces to become microplastic,” read the
report based on the senate’s findings.

“The committee also notes that there is some community confusion
regarding the differences between biodegradable, degradable plastic,
compostable and traditional plastic.

“The committee strongly considers that education campaigns are required
to ensure consumers make informed choices about the alternatives to
traditional plastics being offered.”

Normal plastic bags are usually made from petroleum, while biodegradable
bags are made from plant or organic material which can decompose much
faster.

But UNSW biodiversity expert Mark Browne, one of several scientists who
made submissions to the inquiry, says the biodegradable material has the
“same level of environmental impact” as that in regular plastic bags.

“These pieces of microplastic can be ingested or inhaled by animals,” Mr
Browne told news.com.au. “They can enter their lungs or guts and can
transfer chemicals into the blood and surrounding tissues, which can
affect how well they’re able to fight off infections.

“In plants, they can block the plant’s access to light, and plants need light to photosynthesise and produce food,” he said.
Plastic bags can kill marine life. Here a scuba diver swims over a discarded plastic bag tangled on a coral reef.

These microplastics can also affect how much food and water animals can
consume. “The particles fill up the animals’ guts and they’re not able
to consume as much water or food. They may die from dehydration or
starvation or being infected because their immune systems have been
reduced,” Mr Browne said.

“The public is buying or using these bags thinking that they’re a quick
fix, but there is not enough testing to prove they’re safe.”

Clean Up Australia managing director Terrie Ann Johnson told the inquiry
marine plastic pollution is a growing global threat to biodiversity.
“[It’s already having a devastating impact on the Australian environment
with significant potential to disrupt our lifestyle and lead to
substantial economic loss,” she wrote in a submission.

Ms Johnson said it was a common misconception that marine debris and
plastic pollution in Australia is a result of international pollution,
or waste generated “at sea”.

According to the CSIRO, around 75 per cent of our marine debris is
generated by Australian people, “not the high seas, with debris
concentrated near cities”.

The balance of nature theory, that nature without the influence of human
beings is in harmony, is a myth. But in the wake of environmental
disaster, it can be especially compelling. Case in point: the 1969 Santa
Barbara, California oil spill, which saw images of oil-coated seabirds
and poisoned seals and dolphins splattered on American television. The
urge to do something to prevent similar catastrophes sparked
unprecedented participation at the grassroots level, and a year later,
on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day,
marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Soon thereafter,
Congress codified the movement by passing the Clean Water Act (1972),
the Clean Air Act (1973), and the Endangered Species Act (1973).

In nearly fifty years since that first Earth Day, U.S. environmental
policy has been built on the assumption that nature returns to a state
of harmony and balance when humans leave it undisturbed. But for all its
appeal, the balance of nature theory is supported by neither historical
nor ecological evidence, and most ecologists have not subscribed to it
for decades.

There is no reason to believe that the Earth would be desolate in our
absence, but that surely does not mean that Earth would be better off
without us. Though it is commonly assumed that human beings are distinct
from nature, the reality is that Homo sapiens is the result of the same
natural selection process that resulted in everything else that we call
nature. Far from being separate from nature, we are part of it.

If true, the balance of nature theory would indicate that the healthiest
ecosystems are those that, undisturbed by humans, arrive at a climax
ecology and change little from that state. Natural history does not
support this claim. Rather, disturbance and change, not balance and
harmony, best describe nature. To offer but one obvious example, four of
the five historical mass extinctions were the result of natural causes,
not human activity.

The process of survival has never been a harmonious one. Individual
organisms, even entire species, that are unable to compete are
ruthlessly weeded out by natural selection. Those that are adept at
navigating changes in their environment survive.

When based on the evidence of natural history and ecological science,
environmental regulation is one method of addressing pollution concerns.
The politics of policy-making, however, mean that legislation can be
heavily influenced by the mistaken assumptions of radical environmental
groups, which results in inherently flawed legislation. T he balance of
nature theory is particularly damaging when used as justification for
environmental policy. When emotion and environmental mysticism, instead
of historical evidence and ecological science, hold sway over
policymakers, poor policy is the inevitable result.

This April 22 is the 46th celebration of Earth Day. It is an opportunity
to reflect on the consequences of U.S. environmental policy since the
Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and the first Earth Day in 1970. The
idea that nature does best when we leave it alone is tempting,
especially after the tragedy of human-caused environmental disasters.
Despite its appeal, though, the balance of nature theory is a poor
foundation upon which to build good environmental policy. Scientists
have abandoned it, and it is about time legislators do the same.

Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is becoming explicit.
Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by regulating speech
is apparent in the campaign by 16 states' attorneys general and those of
the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, none Republican, to
criminalize skepticism about the supposedly “settled” conclusions of
climate science.

Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has a destination.
Second, progressives uniquely discern it. (Barack Obama frequently
declares things to be on or opposed to “the right side of history.”)
Third, politics should be democratic but peripheral to governance, which
is the responsibility of experts scientifically administering the
regulatory state. Fourth, enlightened progressives should enforce limits
on speech (witness IRS suppression of conservative advocacy groups) in
order to prevent thinking unhelpful to history’s progressive unfolding.

Progressivism is already enforced on campuses by restrictions on speech
that might produce what progressives consider retrograde intellectual
diversity. Now, from the so-called party of science, aka Democrats,
comes a campaign to criminalize debate about science.

“The debate is settled,” says Obama. “Climate change is a fact.” Indeed.
The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to stigmatize
skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something
obvious: Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing —
neither before nor after the Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th
century to the 13th) and the Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of
which was caused by fossil fuels.

Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is human activity
contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many of which
have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough
to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous
because today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money
expended and freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than
the cost of adapting to it?

But these questions may not forever be debatable. The initial target of
Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they hope to
demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There
is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from
punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.

But it is difficult to establish what constitutes culpable “misleading”
about climate science, of which a 2001 National Academy of Sciences
report says: “Because there is considerable uncertainty in current
understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to
emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the
magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject
to future adjustments (either upward or downward).” Did Al Gore
“mislead” when he said seven years ago that computer modeling projected
the Arctic to be ice-free during the summer in as few as five years?

The attorney general of the Virgin Islands accuses ExxonMobil with
criminal misrepresentation regarding climate change. This, even though
before the U.S. government in 2009 first issued an endangerment finding
regarding greenhouse gases, ExxonMobil favored a carbon tax to mitigate
climate consequences of those gases. This grandstanding attorney
general’s contribution to today’s gangster government is the use of law
enforcement tools to pursue political goals — wielding prosecutorial
weapons to chill debate, including subpoenaing private donor information
from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

The party of science, busy protecting science from scrutiny, has
forgotten Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosopher whose “The Open
Society and Its Enemies” warned against people incapable of
distinguishing between certainty and certitude. In his essay “Science as
Falsification,” Popper explains why “the criterion of a scientific
status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or
testability.” America’s party of science seems eager to insulate its
scientific theories from the possibility of refutation.

The leader of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric Schneiderman,
dismisses those who disagree with him as “morally vacant.” His moral
content is apparent in his campaign to ban fantasy sports gambling
because it competes with the gambling (state lottery, casinos, off-track
betting) that enriches his government.

Then there is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who suggests using the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, written to fight
organized crime, to criminalize what he calls the fossil fuel industry’s
“climate denial apparatus.” The Justice Department, which has abetted
the IRS cover-up of its criminal activity, has referred this idea to the
FBI.

These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate us into
conformity with the “settled” consensus du jour, whatever it is. But
they are progressives, so it is for our own good.

Environmental concerns don’t exactly rank near the top of most
Americans' worries. There are a few reasons for that. One is because
there are far more urgent problems to deal with — like how to mitigate
terrorism and kick-start the still-anemic economy. Junk science also has
a lot to do with it. But another reason could be that most Americans
actually enjoy the effects of global warming. (Imagine that!) In a new
study published in the journal Nature, New York University’s Patrick J.
Egan and Duke University’s Megan Mullin write:

“Using previous research on how weather affects local population growth
to develop an index of people’s weather preferences, we find that 80% of
Americans live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather
than they did four decades ago. Virtually all Americans are now
experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and
these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable
summers or other negative changes.”

Still, the authors say to enjoy the pleasant environment while it lasts.
“Climate change models predict that this trend is temporary, however,
because US summers will eventually warm more than winters,” they add.
“Under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions proceed at an
unabated rate (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), we estimate
that 88% of the US public will experience weather at the end of the
century that is less preferable than weather in the recent past. Our
results have implications for the public’s understanding of the climate
change problem, which is shaped in part by experiences with local
weather.”

But if past climate models were right, the Arctic should be ice-free by
now and its subsequent effects would be destroying the world. Of course,
we already knew that a warmer climate is far more efficient than a cold
one, and is therefore more beneficial to society. Plants, after all,
could not survive without CO2, and studies show that plants thrive when
more CO2 is in the air. That’s why even if global warming is causing
some unwanted effects, a better response is to adapt rather than engage
in a futile attempt to reverse it. If we really want to celebrate Earth
Day and usher in a greener world, let’s stop trying to choke off its
food supply — CO2.

Friday, April 22, marked the 47th Earth Day. You may think it is all
about planting trees and cleaning up neighborhoods. But this year’s
anniversary was closer to its radical roots than, perhaps, any other
since its founding in 1970. Considered the birth of the environmental
movement, the first Earth Day took place during the height of America’s
counterculture era. According to EarthDay.org, it gave voice to an
“emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest
movement and putting environmental concerns on the front page.”

We did need to clean up our act. At that time “littering” wasn’t part of
our vocabulary, The air in the Southern California valley where I grew
up was often so thick with smog we couldn’t see the surrounding
mountains.

Thankfully, that has changed.

Look around your community. You’ll likely see green trees, blue skies,
and bodies of water sparkling in the sunshine. With the success of the
environmental movement, its supporters, and the nonprofit groups it
spawned, had to become ever more radical to stay relevant.

Environmentalism has changed.

The morphing of the movement may be most evident in Earth Day 2016 —
which some are calling “the most important Earth Day in history.”

This year, on April 22, in a high-level celebration at the United
Nations headquarters in New York, the Paris Climate Agreement will
officially be signed. Thirty days after its signing by at least 55
countries that represent 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions,
the agreement will take effect — committing countries to establishing
individual targets for emission reductions with the expectation that
they will be reviewed and updated every five years.

While news reports of Earth Day 2016 will likely depict dancing in the
streets, those who can look past the headlines will see a dire picture —
one in which more than 10 percent of a household’s income is spent on
energy costs; one of “green energy poverty.”

To meet the non-binding commitments President Obama made last December
in Paris, he is counting on, among many domestic regulations, the Clean
Power Plan (CPP).

Last week, on the Senate floor, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), chairman of
the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered remarks in
advance of Earth Day on the unattainability of the U.S. climate
commitments. He said: “The Clean Power Plan is the centerpiece of the
president’s promise to the international community that the U.S. will
cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent.” It would “cause
double digit electricity price increases in 40 states” and “would
prevent struggling communities from accessing reliable and affordable
fuel sources, which could eventually lead to poor families choosing
between putting healthy food on the table or turning their heater on in
the winter.”

The Heritage Foundation has just released a report on the devastating
economic costs of the Paris Climate Agreement, which it calls “a push
for un-development for the industrialized world and a major obstacle for
growth for the developing world.” Because global warming regulations
“stifle the use of the most efficient and inexpensive forms of
electricity, businesses as well as households will incur higher
electricity costs.” The report concludes: “restricting energy production
to meet targets like those of the Paris agreement will significantly
harm the U.S. economy. Bureaucratically administered mandates, taxes,
and special interest subsidies will drive family incomes down by
thousands of dollars per year, drive up energy costs, and eliminate
hundreds of thousands of jobs. All of these costs would be incurred to
achieve only trivial and theoretical impacts on global warming.”

Real world experience bears out the both Inhofe’s observations and the Heritage Foundation’s conclusions.

Germany is one of the best examples of green energy poverty as the
country has some of the most aggressive greenhouse gas reduction
programs that offer generous subsidies for any company producing green
energy. Based on an extensive study done by green energy believers in
2014, I addressed the program’s overall result: raised costs and raised
emissions. I stated: “After reading the entire 80-page white paper, I
was struck with three distinct observations. The German experiment has
raised energy costs to households and business, the subsidies are
unsustainable, and, as a result, without intervention, the energy supply
is unstable.” At that time, I concluded: “The high prices
disproportionately hurt the poor, giving birth to the new phrase:
‘energy poverty.’”

More recently, others have come to the same conclusion (read here and
here). On April 13, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opined: “Germany’s
16-year-old Energiewende, or energy transformation, already has wrecked
the country’s energy market in its quest to wean the economy off fossil
fuels and nuclear power. Traditional power plants, including those that
burn cleaner gas, have been closing left and right while soaring
electricity prices push industries overseas and bankrupt households. Job
losses run to the tens of thousands.” Meanwhile, emissions over the
past seven years have increased. Last month, Mike Shellenberger,
President, Environmental Progress and Time magazine “Hero of the
Environment,” tweeted: “people really want to believe good things about
Germany’s energy shift, but … its emissions rose.” WSJ concludes: “The
market distortions caused by overreliance on expensive but undependable
power already have pushed German utilities to rely more on cheap and
dirty coal-fired power plants to make up the shortfall when renewable
sources can’t meet demand.”

Germany is not alone.

The U.K., according to Reuters, is facing “fuel poverty.” The report
states: “The government is also under pressure to curb rising energy
bills with 2.3 million of Britain’s 27 million households deemed fuel
poor, meaning the cost of heating their homes leaves them with income
below the poverty line.” Another account covers the U.K.’s cuts to solar
subsidies, saying: “The government says the changes were necessary to
protect bill payers, as the solar incentives are levied on household
energy bills.”

The Netherlands, which is already behind in meeting its green energy
targets, has, according to the Washington Post, had to build three new
coal-fueled power plants—in part, at least, to power the high percentage
of electric cars. Additionally, the country has hundreds of wind
turbines that are operating at a loss and are in danger of being
demolished. A report states: “Subsidies for generating wind energy are
in many cases no longer cost-effective. Smaller, older windmills in
particular are running at a loss, but even newer mills are struggling to
be profitable with insufficient subsidies.”

Bringing it closer to home, there is über-green California—where
billionaire activist Tom Steyer aggressively pushes green energy
policies. Headlines tout California has the most expensive market for
retail gasoline nationwide. But, according to the Institute for Energy
Research, it also has some of the highest electricity prices in the
country—“about 40 percent higher than the national average.” A 2012
report from the Manhattan Institute, states that about one million
California households were living in “energy poverty”—with Latinos and
African Americans being the hardest hit. With the Golden State’s
headlong rush toward lower carbon-dioxide emissions and greater use of
renewables, the energy poverty figure is surely much higher today.

This week, as you hear commentators celebrate “the most important Earth
Day in history” and the global significance of the signing of the Paris
Climate Agreement, remember the result of policies similar to CPP: green
energy poverty. Use these stories (there are many more) to talk to your
friends. Make this “Green Energy Poverty Week” and share it: #GEPW.

We, however, do not need to be doomed to green energy poverty. There is some good news.

First, the Paris Climate Agreement is non-binding. Even Todd Stern, U.S.
climate envoy, acknowledged in the Huffington Post: “What Paris does is
put in place a structure that will encourage countries to increase
their targets every five years.” While the requisite number of countries
will likely sign it before the election of the next president, the only
enforcement mechanism is political shaming. Even if it was legally
binding, as was the Koyto Protocol, Reason Magazine points out what
happened to countries, like Canada and Japan, which “violated their
solemn treaty obligations”—NOTHING. The Heritage report adds: “History,
however, gives little confidence that such compliance will even occur.
For instance, China is building 350 coal-fired power plants, and has
plans for another 800.”

Then there is the legal delay to the implementation of the CPP—which,
thanks to a Supreme Court decision earlier this year, will be tied up in
courts for at least the next two years. Inhofe stated: “Without the
central component of (Obama’s) international climate agenda, achieving
the promises made in Paris are mere pipe dreams.”

“President Obama’s climate pledge is unobtainable and it stands no
chance of succeeding in the United States,” Inhofe said. “For the sake
of the economic well-being of America, that’s a good thing.”

There was a time in America—and it wasn’t even so long ago—that liberals
actually cared about working class people. They may have been misguided
in many of their policy solutions (i.e., raising the minimum wage) but
at least their heart was in the right place.

Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. The radical leftwing
environmentalists took control. These are people who care more about the
supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle
class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed
with these radicals and now they—and all of us—are paying a heavy price.

The latest evidence came last week when another coal giant in America,
Peabody Energy Corp., declared bankruptcy. This is the same fate
suffered by Arch Coal Inc., Alpha Natural Resources Inc., and other coal
producers that have filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors.

Peabody has stated that the lower cost of natural gas may have been a
factor in their decline, and I am all for market competition, but this
isn’t a result of free market creative destruction. This was largely a
policy strategy by the White House and green groups.

They wanted this to happen. This was what Clean Power Plant rules from the Environmental Protection Agency were all about.

The EPA set standards by design that were impossible to meet and even
flouted the law that says the regulations should be “commercially
achievable.” This was a key component of the climate change fanaticism
that pervades this White House.

Progressive liberals don’t seem to care that an estimated 31,000 coal
miners, truckers, engineers, construction workers and others have lost
their job since 2009 as a result of this global warming fanaticism.
Another 5,000 or so could be given pink slips at Peabody.

To the left, the families whose lives are ruined are collateral damage
to achieve their utopian dream of saving the planet. The Stalinists who
now run the green movement believe the ends justify the ruthless means.

Investors have gotten crushed too as a result of coal’s demise. The coal
industry has lost tens of billions of dollars in stock value since
2009—with many of these losses in union pension funds and 401k plans.

What is maddening about all of this is that coal is much cleaner than
ever before. EPA statistics show that emissions of sulfer, lead, carbon
monoxide, and smog from coal plants have been reduced by 50 to 90
percent in the last 40 years.

(The air we breathe is cleaner than ever. Carbon dioxide, by the way, is not a pollutant—it doesn’t make you sick.)

Global warming fanatics should ask themselves what they are
accomplishing. For every coal plant we shut down, China and India build
another 10 or so. Our coal is much cleaner and our environmental laws
much stricter than China’s and India’s, so this shift of output and jobs
from the U.S. to our rivals succeeds in making us poorer and the planet
dirtier.

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have an estimated 500-year
supply. So for economic and ecological reasons, we should want American
coal to dominate the world market, but the mindless environmentalists’
rallying cry is: “Keep it in the ground.”

Do liberals care that the demise of coal could lead to major disruptions in America’s electric power supply?

Coal still supplies more than one-third of our electricity, because it
is cheap and highly reliable—much more so than wind and solar energy.
Perhaps the millennials will realize their mistake when they won’t be
able to power up their PlayStation 4s, their iPhones, and their laptops.

Republicans in Congress aren’t blameless here. They have controlled the
House for five years and both chambers since 2015. But they have sat by
while the EPA destroys an iconic American industry.

Why has Congress not overruled EPA rules on carbon, which is not a
pollutant? Every poll shows Americans care most about jobs and the
economy—and only about 3 percent care most about climate change. Yet,
they refuse to stand up to Obama and take the side of the American
worker.

It’s not too late to revive American coal, but that strategy starts with
putting jobs first. I thought that’s what both parties have been
promising.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

26 April, 2016

The greatest false prophets of all time

Organic Fertilizer Is Great at Killing Bees

There have been huge Greenie panics about recurrent deaths among
bees. They are all sure that modern insecticide and fertilizer usage is
the cause. But could it be that "organic" farming is the real
culprit?

A given of the organic agriculture movement is that organic growers
don’t use synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, like organophosphates
and glyphosate (RoundUp). All that fear-mongering about pesticides is
only possible because environmental groups only test for the synthetic
kind, they don’t test for the pesticides and fertilizers used by organic
growers.

Because those are safer? Absolutely not.

In the Journal of Economic Entomology, Brazilian scientists studied the
effects of copper sulfate, a fertilizer and pesticide that is approved
in the U.S. for use in organic agriculture and applied to the leaves of
crop plants. Obviously the smarter approach is to treat seeds instead of
using a broad spectrum pesticide, and that is the premise behind
neonicotinoids, which environmental groups also protest — by treating
seeds, which bees have no interest in, rather than plants, which bees do
have an interest in, farmers get better yields with less environmental
impact.

So why do organic farmers insist on carpet-bombing plants with chemicals
instead? The science is clearly against them, so it’s for psychologists
to figure out. The new paper adds to the literature showing that a
targeted approach is just better, not just for honeybees, but also for
stingless bees (Friesella schrottkyi), which are native to the Americas
and not an introduced species like the honeybee. They are known to
pollinate crop plants.

What did they find? The organic pesticide approach is incredibly toxic for bees.

The investigators compared the effects of copper sulfate and another
leaf fertilizer mixture, as well as a commonly used insecticide
(spinosad) on the stingless bees. They found that the copper sulfate was
more lethal to the bees than the insecticide when the insects ingested
it in a sugar solution.

They wrote: “[L]eaf fertilizers seem to deserve attention and concern
regarding their potential impact on native pollinators, notably
Neotropical stingless bees such as F. schrottkyi. Their heavy metal
content is above the safety threshold for the stingless bee species
studied, which may also be the case for related species. Furthermore,
the mix of heavy metals in some leaf fertilizers and the presence of
S[ulfur] and sometimes B[oron] may increase their risks. In sum, leaf
fertilizers deserve proper risk assessment because of the isolated and
mixed use of heavy metals in such fertilizers.”

So, the next time you read organic marketing claims about how synthetic
pesticides and fertilizers are dangerous, be a little more skeptical.
When they are applied by spray, there’s really no reason to distinguish
between the two types.

A good reminder that Warmist climate predictions are all totally dependant on heroic assumptions about "feedbacks"

But the feedbacks are all highly theoretical and don't overall seem
to work the way the Warmists say. Video from 2013 by Dr. David
M.W. Evans. Watch towards the end. It gets very interesting.

Sanders' Climate Policies Are Anything but Green

On Bernie Sanders' campaign website, he erroneously claims, “While
fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, climate change
ravages our planet and our people — all because the wealthiest industry
in the history of our planet has bribed politicians into ignoring
science.” Yet ignoring science is exactly what he’s doing when he claims
to have a magic formula for reversing global warming.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Keith Johnson and Molly O'Toole observe,
“Fracking for natural gas has helped utilities mothball dirty coal
plants. And nuclear power provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity — and
all of it is emissions free. Both energy sources would be targeted by
Sanders, yet very hard to replace.” Citing a study by the think tank
Third Way, Johnson and O'Toole say “getting rid of nuclear power means
U.S. carbon emissions would ‘go up dramatically,’ and in the worst-case
scenario, could ‘wipe out a decade’s worth of progress’ and return U.S.
carbon emissions to levels last seen in 2005. That’s because retired
nuclear plants would almost always be replaced by natural gas or coal.”

Germany is a good example. While slowly weaning itself off of nuclear
power, emissions are on the increase. As Rick Moran at PJMedia points
out, “Today, solar power accounts for only one percent of the electric
grid. Wind power is responsible for 5%. Despite tens of billions of
dollars in grants and loans given to these ‘renewable’ energy companies
over the last 8 years, nuclear power still generates more than twice the
electricity as solar and wind put together. And Sanders wants to
destroy the nuclear industry.” He adds that Sanders' ideals “are not
designed to deal with energy as much as they’re supposed to impoverish
us by reducing output for reasons having nothing to do with generating
electricity or fueling our cars.” This is Socialism in a nutshell.

Climate Alarmists Alarmed Public No Longer Panicked About The Climate, Demand More Doomsday Headlines!

Climate science critics Dr. Sebastian Lüning and professor Fritz
Vahrenholt present some findings that climate alarmists are not very
amused over: Climate alarmism has waned and is no longer making any
headlines. The two co-authors of “The Neglected Sun” write at
their site:

“People aren’t dumb. Climate alarmism just isn’t working. The public is
fed up with the constant unending apocalypse, for which there are still
no reliable indications. Gradually the alarm has been disappearing from
the headlines.

Here the UN is getting very worried because with the help of climate
panic they wish to justify huge finance transfers from the rich to the
poor. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has
expressed these concerns in a press release.

It is indeed absurd that the climate change is being hyped as the
‘greatest problem for humanity’ at a time when the world is currently
suffering from rampant terrorism and migration crises.

What on earth is going through the heads of the climate romanticists? Do
they not want to or are they just unable to see the reality? Is it all
about money? Or power? Read the following from the IFAD press release
April 6, 2016, which will leave you amazed:

Even as 60 million people around the world face severe hunger because of
El Niño and millions more because of climate change, top European and
American media outlets are neglecting to cover the issues as a top news
item, says a new research report funded by the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD) today.

“It’s incredible that in a year when we have had record temperatures, 32
major droughts, and historic crop losses that media are not positioning
climate change on their front pages,” said IFAD President, Kanayo F.
Nwanze. “Climate change is the biggest threat facing our world today and
how the media shape the narrative remains vitally important in
pre-empting future crises.”

The report, “The Untold Story: Climate change sinks below the headlines”
provides an analysis of the depth of media reporting around climate
change in two distinct periods: two months before the 21st session of
the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris, and two months
after. Specifically, it explores whether issues connecting climate
change, food security, agriculture and migration made headlines, and if
so, how much prominence these stories were given.

Among some of its key findings:

* Climate change stories were either completely absent or their numbers
decreased in major media outlets in Europe and the United States before
and after COP21.

* Coverage on the consequences of climate change, such as migration,
fell by half in the months after COP21 and people directly impacted by
climate change rarely had a voice in stories or were not mentioned at
all.

* News consumers want climate change issues and solutions to be given
more prominence in media outlets and, in particular, want more
information on the connections between climate change, food insecurity,
conflict and migration.

The release of the report comes just days before world leaders gather at
the United Nations in New York to sign off on the Paris Agreement
coming out of COP21. In December, the agreement made headlines and led
news bulletins across the globe. But leading up to COP21 and in the
months following it, coverage on climate change significantly fell off
the radar of major media outlets across Europe and the United States.
[…]

Having destroyed US coal industry, Democrats and eco allies are now attacking all fossil fuels

Paul Driessen

The great white environmentalist sharks smell blood in the water. It’s
gushing from mortally wounded US coal companies that the Obama EPA has
gutted as sacrifices on the altar of “dangerous manmade climate change”
prevention and other spurious health, ecological and planetary scares.

Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and other once vibrant coal producers have
filed for Chapter 11 protection, shedding some $30 billion in
shareholder value and tens of thousands of jobs in their companies and
dependent industries. The bloodletting has left communities and states
reeling, union pension funds and 401k plans empty, and the health,
welfare, hopes and dreams of countless families dashed on the rocks.

President Obama promised to bankrupt coal companies with punitive regulations, and he kept his word.

Hydraulic fracturing did play a role. It made natural gas abundant and
inexpensive, and gas-fueled power plants increasingly attractive for
utilities that were forced to shutter modern coal-fired units that
provided reliable, affordable power, emitted little harmful pollution,
and had years of useful life remaining.

However, as economist Stephen Moore noted, coal’s demise wasn’t “a
result of free market creative destruction. This was a policy strategy
by the White House and green groups. They wanted this to happen.”

“This was what EPA’s Clean Power Plan rules were all about,” Moore adds.
“The EPA set standards that by design were impossible to meet, and even
flouted the law that says the regs should be ‘commercially achievable.’
This was a key component of the climate change fanaticism that pervades
this White House.”

To this president, the EPA and the Left in general, he concludes, “the
families whose lives are ruined are collateral damage to achieve their
utopian dream of saving the planet.” It’s a Climate Hustle.

It is today’s equivalent of New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief and
Stalin apologist Walter Duranty’s favorite line: “You can’t make an
omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But after tens of millions of
broken human “eggs,” where are the communist and green utopia omelets?

40,000 elderly Europeans died this past winter, because they could no
longer afford adequate wintertime heat, after EU climate policies sent
electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketing” more than 40% since 1997.
Millions die every year in Africa from lung, intestinal and other
readily preventable diseases, while President Obama tells Africans they
should forego fossil fuels and rely on wind, solar and biofuel power,
because “if every one of you has got a car and … a big house, well, the
planet will boil over.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama joined Chinese, Indian and other world leaders in
signing the Paris climate treaty on Earth Day, ignoring the requirement
for Senate ratification. The hypocrisy and insanity are boundless.

The treaty will obligate the United States and other developed nations
to slash their fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions and economic
growth. China, India and other developing economies are under no such
requirement, unless and until it is in their interest to do so. For
them, compliance is voluntary – and it should be. They simply cannot
afford to eliminate fuels that supply 85% of all global energy and are
their ticket out of poverty and into the world of modern health and
prosperity that we enjoy, thus far.

In fact, while unaccountable EPA bureaucrats are shutting down US
coal-fired generators, these countries have built over 1,000 coal-fired
power plants and plan to build 2,300 more – 1,400 gigawatts of new
electricity. China and India account for 1,077 GW of this total. They
are also lining up for free energy technology and billions of dollars a
year from developed nations for climate change “reparations.”

That is why poor countries signed the Paris treaty. It has nothing to do with preventing climate change.

But none of this has stopped the environmentalist sharks from starting a
fossil fuels feeding frenzy. The bloodied American coal companies have
them churning the water, chomping for more. They’ve launched a “keep it
in the ground” movement, to make hydrocarbons off limits forever.

In fact, environmentalism is morphing into an anti-hydrocarbons climate
movement that claims every weather event and climate blip is
unprecedented, a harbinger of Armageddon – and caused by our using oil,
gas and coal to power modern civilization and improve human health and
living standards.

Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle tallies 350.org and 20 other
climate coalitions, comprised of 467 separate organizations, just in
the USA. Funded and directed by Rockefeller and other wealthy liberal
foundations, they increasingly rail against “dangerous manmade climate
change” as an “existential threat” to humanity and planet.

President Obama is totally onboard. His policy and regulatory agenda
confirms that. So are Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and most of an
increasingly far-Left Democrat Party.

Sanders flatly opposes all “fracking” and has introduced legislation to
keep America’s abundant fossil fuels locked up in perpetuity. Clinton
opposes all fossil fuel energy extraction from federal lands, wants to
block fracking by imposing countless regulatory obstacles, and intends
to make the United States 50% dependent on renewable energy by 2030. As
president, they would achieve this by executive decree.

The consequences would be disastrous: enormous acreage, water,
fertilizer, pesticides and fuel devoted to producing biofuel, millions
of birds and bats butchered by wind turbines to generate electricity,
millions of jobs lost, millions of families sent into fuel poverty as
energy costs rocket upward. For what benefits?

The rest of the world will continue using hydrocarbons. That means, even
assuming CO2 now drives Earth’s climate, ]implementing EPA’s draconian
Clean Power Plan would keep average planetary temperatures from rising
an undetectable 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit, and seas from rising an
imperceptible 0.01 inches, by the end of the century. (Oceans have
already risen 400 feet since the last nature-driven ice age ended and
all those mile-high glaciers melted.) See CFACT’s Climate Hustle
movie on Monday!

The “keep it in the ground” crowd doesn’t care about this or the
mounting death tolls resulting from their anti-fossil fuel policies. The
typical voter or street protester probably hasn’t thought it through.
But the leaders have. They’re just callously indifferent. It’s one more
depressing example of “the well-intentioned but ill-informed being led
around by the ill-intentioned but well-informed.”

Politicians, environmentalists, alarmist scientists and renewable energy
industrialists have built a $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Crisis
industry that gives them research grants, campaign cash, mandates, huge
subsidies – and vast regulatory power to eliminate conventional energy;
make electricity rates skyrocket; fundamentally transform economic
systems; control lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties; and
redistribute the world’s wealth. Poor, minority and working class
families will suffer most.

The ruling elites don’t care. They will do well, travel often, keep
their pensions and get still wealthier. Climate rules, deprivation and
“sustainability” are for the Little People.

This entire system is based on the unproven bald assertion that fossil
fuels are causing dangerous and unprecedented weather and climate
disruption … carbon dioxide has replaced the complex natural forces that
drove drive climate change in previous centuries … there is no longer
any room for debate over these “facts” … and the only issue still open
to discussion is what to do to avert “imminent catastrophe.”

We “skeptics” challenge these claims. We point out that Earth’s
temperature, climate and weather have always changed in response to
powerful natural forces, and differ little today from what they have
been for the past 50-150 years. We say the problem is not climate
change, but policies imposed in the name of preventing climate change.
We threaten the Climate Crisis Establishment, and its money and power.

That’s why they want to shut us up and shut us down – by prosecuting us
for “racketeering,” and denying us our constitutional rights to speak
out about policies that affect our lives. It is a disgraceful,
un-American return to Inquisition tactics and fascist book burnings.

We must all take a stand, fight back and assert our rights. Otherwise, our children face a grim future.

Via email

Inhofe: Obama’s Wrong. Climate Change Is Not Our Biggest Threat

Last year, Vox pressed the president on the matter, asking if he truly
believes it is a greater threat than even terrorism. He responded by
saying “absolutely,” and his press secretary Josh Earnest reaffirmed a
day later saying unapologetically, “the threat of climate change is
greater than the threat of terrorism.”

Just a few days after the administration’s remarks, the Islamic State
beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in the Middle East and posted it on the
Internet for all to see. While the president is busy pushing climate
change as the most important issue among international elites, the
Islamic State is working to recruit its newest members using such
tactics as this.

To suggest that rising temperature is the cause for these efforts is not only disingenuous, but also dangerous.

The objective of these acts of terror is to destroy Western way of life,
extinguish religious minority groups, drive out vulnerable and poor
populations, and suppress women and children’s freedom and participation
in society. To suggest that rising temperature is the cause for these
efforts is not only disingenuous, but also dangerous.

On April 13, I held a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to
highlight the consequences of the Obama administration’s rhetoric that
elevates the theory of man-driven climate change above the current
threats our society is facing.

Retired Major Gen. Bob Scales provided an expert perspective on the
tendency for liberals to compare climate change and war, saying that:

The administration’s passion to connect climate change and war is an
example of faulty theories that rely on relevance of politically correct
imaginings rather than established historical precedent or a learned
understanding of war.

Gen. Scales went on to testify that the greater threat is the Obama
administration’s syphoning off of defense dollars in order to pay for
his climate change initiatives. The $120 billion spent by the Obama
administration on climate change in the past seven years would have
better served our national defense.

Instead the administration has put into motion $1 trillion in defense
budget cuts while also using precious defense funds for wasteful green
energy initiatives to include building biofuel refineries for the
private sector—a job more suited for the Department of Energy.

Gen. Scales highlighted that as a result of this misprioritization of
taxpayer dollars, our “soldiers and sailors today are bombarded by a
series of global threats and diminishing resources. The additional
distraction of focusing on climate change in the midst of all this is
simply counterproductive.”

Today, the international community gathers once again in the name of
climate change, this time in New York City to sign the Paris agreement.
We will undoubtedly hear speech after speech about how today’s actions
are necessary in order to save our children’s children from an imperiled
future.

The U.N. is great at hyping up the legitimacy of photo-op diplomacy. But
these actions are a distraction from the fact that climate change
policies come at a high economic cost while having no actual impact on
the climate change.

These actions are a distraction from the fact that climate change
policies come at a high economic cost while having no actual impact on
the climate change.

For the United States, the high profile distraction being led by
Secretary of State John Kerry is meant to settle the concern among some
international circles that President Obama will not be able to follow
through on his emission reduction promises.

But these concerns are well founded, especially in light of the Supreme
Court’s truly historic stay against his Clean Power Plan, which makes
delivery of his 26 to 28 percent emission reduction promise wholly
unrealistic.

It’s a shame the president and the U.N. will spend the day celebrating
an agreement that has no legal weight and will ultimately fail just like
the Kyoto Protocol.

Their time and our resources would have been better spent unifying the
international community around a need to protect and defend our citizens
from the real threat at the door step—radical Islamic extremism.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

25 April, 2016

The lying never stops. Now krill are being used to push Warmist nonsense

If you read carefully below, you will see that it's only warming in
the Western Antarctic that is at issue. So if the warming is due
to climate change why is the much greater bulk of the rest of Antarctica
remaining stable and even gaining glacial mass? Easy. The
Western Antarctic warming is NOT due to climate change. It is now
well-known that there is extensive vulcanism at both poles -- localized
in the South mainly in the Western Antarctic. It is subsurface volcanoes
that are causing the localised warming of the Western Antarctic, not
CO2 emissions

'Krill is the power lunch of the Antarctic': But now the decline in
numbers of the tiny crustaceans caused by climate change is killing
penguins

Penguins, seals and whales in the Southern Ocean are being threatened by
a declining krill population caused by climate change and melting
Antarctic sea ice.

The inch-long crustaceans are considered the 'basis' of the Antarctic
food chain and use sea ice to protect themselves and feed from the algae
that grows from it.

Penguin-watchers say the krill are getting scarcer in the western
Antarctic peninsula, under threat from climate change and fishing

The inch-long crustaceans are considered the 'basis' of the Antarctic
food chain and use sea ice to protect themselves and feed from the algae
that grows from it

'Krill is the power lunch of the Antarctic. It's a keystone species for everybody,' group leader Ron Naveen said.

Sea temperatures on the peninsula have risen by three degrees in the past 50 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature said the threat of
declining krill populations was significant and claims 300,000 tons of
krill is caught annually and used for farmed fish and 'Omega 3' oil
supplements.

However, Norwegian fishing company Aker BioMarine said the amount of
krill caught by humans is comparatively small, with just 0.5 per cent of
the 60 million tons eaten each year by sea creatures.

More evidence of how poorly understood coral reefs are.
Warmists are dogmatic that recent bleaching on the Northern part of
Australia's GBR is due to global warming but who knows? This recent
discovery was apparently a huge surprise. There were not supposed
to be corals in that location. So it shows how little we actually
know about how corals work

What it does show is that corals are
highly adaptable and can survive a lot of challenges. It might
also be noted that there are benthic corals in Icelandic waters that get
no sunlight at all. They have become filter feeders. Some
of the South American corals may be that too

Yup. Science is settled.

Scientists astonished to find 600-mile long reef under the muddy water in a site already marked for oil exploration
Scientists were ‘flabbergasted’ to discover the Amazon reef as coral usually thrives in clear, sunlit tropical waters.
A huge 3,600 sq mile (9,300 sq km) coral reef system has been found
below the muddy waters off the mouth of the river Amazon, astonishing
scientists, governments and oil companies who have started to explore on
top of it.

The existence of the 600-mile long reef, which ranges from about 30-120m
deep and stretches from French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranha?o state, was
not suspected because many of the world’s great rivers produce major
gaps in reef systems where no corals grow.

In addition, there was little previous evidence because corals mostly
thrive in clear, sunlit, salt water, and the equatorial waters near the
mouth of the Amazon are some of the muddiest in the world, with vast
quantities of sediment washed thousands of miles down the river and
swept hundreds of miles out to sea.
But the reef appears to be thriving below the freshwater “plume”, or
outflow, of the Amazon. Compared to many other reefs, the scientists say
in a paper in Science Advances on Friday, it is is relatively
“impoverished”. Nevertheless, they found over 60 species of sponges, 73
species of fish, spiny lobsters, stars and much other reef life.

How Manitoba’s ‘green’ power dream became a nightmare of runaway costs

Since the early 2000s, Manitoba’s NDP government has committed the
province’s power system to expand and profit from the fight against
global warming. With the federal government now developing a national
energy plan with the same objectives — and Manitoba’s NDP fighting for
re-election on Tuesday — there’s no better time to take stock of the
provincial government’s efforts over the last 15 years.

And the results so far are clear: power sold at a loss to U.S. buyers,
calls for federal subsidies, new debts and losses for Manitoba Hydro, a
less-diversified power supply, and expensive rate hikes forecast to keep
rising for the next 20 years. The few winners have been contractors and
construction unions and some northern First Nations.

It started with an experiment to replace the fossil-fuel-power that
back-up Manitoba’s hydro-electricity with wind power in the province’s
gusty south. After that ended up too costly, the government turned its
attention to the Far North.

Its first big green initiative there was the 200-megawatt Wuskwatim dam
built on the Burntwood Diversion near Thompson. Approved in 2004, the
project was expected to cost $900 million and rake in profits from
exported power to the U.S. When it was finished eight years later, the
capital cost including necessary transmission, came in at $2 billion.
After all that, the cost of generating and conveying power came in at
roughly 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, but buyers are now willing to pay
only around three cents per kilowatt-hour.

The rise of fracking and the collapse in natural gas and spot
electricity prices, combined with American solar and wind subsidies and
better U.S. energy efficiency all killed any hopes for the “green
premium” that Manitoba had banked its renewable-power plan on. And yet
Wuskwatim’s failure would not deter the NDP government from pursuing yet
more costly additional northern hydro-electric and transmission
projects.

After a review and a recommendation from Manitoba’s Public Utilities
Board, the government did at least suspend immediate plans for the
massive northern hydro dam, Conawapa, planned with about seven times the
capacity of Wuskwatim. But it continues to barge ahead with the ongoing
construction of the 695-megawatt Keeyask dam, and its massive new
meandering transmission line, which runs through valuable farmland. The
dam is currently estimated to cost $6.5 billion; the transmission line
another $4.6 billion. Given recent experience, it’s possible they could
end up costing almost twice as much.

And the government…will see a windfall from the levies it imposes on the
utility, leaving ratepayers with decades of higher bills to cover those
costs.

Some First Nations have done well thanks to these projects. To win their
backing, the government gave them hundreds of millions of dollars in
pre-construction inducements, along with one-third equity interests in
Wuskwatim and Keeyask, acquired through no-risk loans from Manitoba
Hydro.

And the government, as Manitoba Hydro’s sole shareholder, will see a
windfall from the levies it imposes on the utility, leaving ratepayers
with decades of higher bills to cover those costs. The Public Utilities
Board’s review revealed that the provincial government could expect at
least $25 to $30 billion of additional levies over the next five decades
if these, and various other parts of Manitoba Hydro’s expansion plans
all go ahead. The provincial levies include capital taxes,
debt-guarantee fees, and water rentals, in addition to normal payroll
and income taxes on contractors and Hydro employees and provincial sales
taxes levied on consumer and business bills.

But for Manitobans themselves, the green future is looking dark. Thirty
per cent of provincial households are lower income and the province has
seen no major new industry spring up in 15 years. Meanwhile, there is
downward pressure on domestic demand due to rising prices; export prices
and demand are in the doldrums; and Manitoba Hydro is already sitting
on 30 per cent more generation and transmission capacity than the
province’s power demands actually require.

Back when oil was over $100 a barrel, then Manitoba NDP Premier Gary
Doer frequently asserted that hydro-generated electricity was Manitoba’s
oil. His government crowed about the “Manitoba Advantage” of cheap,
green hydro power. Even as export prices and volumes fell, his
successor, Greg Selinger, ignored the changing economics and continued
to accept massive over-budget construction costs. That “advantage” is
now fading fast, while Manitoba Hydro’s debt becomes instead an
albatross around the province’s financial neck.

Taking aim at one of Secretary of State John Kerry’s most cherished
causes, a group of Republican senators is warning him that the
administration will violate U.S. law if it does not cut off funding to
the U.N.’s climate change agency and affiliated entities in response to
its recent admission of the “State of Palestine.”

In a letter to Kerry, 28 senators pointed out that the U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decision to admit the Palestinians
should trigger a funding cutoff in line with a 1994 law.

That’s what the administration – reluctantly – did in 2011 when the U.N.
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization became the first
U.N. agency to admit the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) as a member. The
administration has been trying since then to obtain congressional waiver
authority to enable it to restore funding to UNESCO, without success.

This time the target is bigger – and even closer to Kerry’s heart. Not
only the UNFCCC is in the Republican senators’ crosshairs, but also the
affiliated Green Climate Fund (GCF), whose aim is to help developing
countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to various phenomena
blamed on climate change.

While the administration has requested $13 million for the UNFCCC in
fiscal year 2017, President Obama has pledged $3 billion to the GCF over
four years. The first $500 million of that pledged amount was
transferred on March 7.

Many Republican lawmakers also oppose the administration’s domestic and
international actions on climate change, including its efforts to
circumvent Congress in committing the U.S. to the Paris agreement.

When the administration transferred the first $500 million instalment of
the promised $3 billion to the GCF last month, Barrasso questioned how
what he called the “handout to foreign bureaucrats” could be justified
in the current economic climate.

Challenging a State Department official during a Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearing, Barrasso also noted that Congress had not
authorized or appropriated any funding for the GCF, and charged that the
payment violates legislation which prohibits federal agencies from
spending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.

Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom said
in response the department had “reviewed our authorities and made a
determination that we can make this payment to the Green Climate Fund.”

Kerry, who has championed the climate change issue for decades, said
after the Paris accord was struck that he did not believe Americans
would ever elect as president a candidate who did not support the
international climate change effort.

“I don’t think they’re going to accept as a genuine leader someone who
doesn’t understand the science of climate change and isn’t willing to do
something about it,” he said.

Scientists Build a Better Incandescent Light Bulb… Six Years After Last US Factory Closes

The bureaucratic way to save power is about to be superseded by a better method -- a technological innovation

Six years after the last incandescent light bulb factory in the U.S.
shut down due to strict new federal energy conservation standards,
scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come
up with a technological breakthrough that could make incandescent bulbs
twice as energy-efficient as their replacements.

MIT researchers discovered that by wrapping the filament of an
incandescent bulb with a “photonic crystal,” they could “recycle” the
energy that was typically lost as heat to create more light.

The new technique “makes a dramatic difference in how efficiently the
system converts electricity into light,” said the research team led by
MIT professors Marin Solja?i?, John Joannopoulos and Gang Chen.

Their results were published online in the January edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“The heat just keeps bouncing back in toward the filament until it
finally ends up as visible light,” MIT post-doctoral researcher Ognjen
Ilic explained. “It reduces the energy that would otherwise be wasted.”

In 2007, Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which
set new energy conservation standards for lighting fixtures and other
products by 2014 in order to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas
emissions.

The “new light bulb law”, as it was called, required “25 percent greater
efficiency for household light bulbs that have traditionally used
between 40 and 100 watts of electricity,” according to the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA).

The stringent new standards effectively prohibited the manufacture of
most ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the U.S. As a result, GE
shuttered the last domestic incandescent light bulb factory in the
nation in 2010, laying off 200 workers in Winchester, Virginia.

Since then, incandescent bulbs have been largely replaced with more
energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) and light-emitting
diode (LED) lamps. In February, GE announced that due to poor sales, it
would no longer make or sell CFLs – which contain mercury - in the U.S.,
and will focus on the more expensive, but longer lasting LEDs instead.

But a new generation of incandescent bulbs could be twice as energy
efficient as LEDs without the drawbacks, including higher initial cost
and “inconsistent” white light.

“Whereas the luminous efficiency of conventional incandescent lights is
between 2 and 3 percent, that of fluorescents (including CFLs) is
between 7 and 15 percent, and that of most commercial LEDs between 5 and
20 percent, the new two-stage incandescents could reach efficiencies as
high as 40 percent,” according to a press release from MIT.

The MIT researchers noted that the greater increase in energy efficiency
also comes with “exceptional reproduction of colours and scalable
power.”

In February, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) introduced the Energy
Efficiency Free Market Act of 2016 (HR 4504), which would prohibit
states and federal agencies from adopting “any requirement to comply
with a standard for energy conservation or water efficiency with respect
to a product.”

“This legislation eliminates the overreaching arm of the federal
government that continues to force itself into the household of the
American consumer,” Burgess said. “When the market drives the standard,
there’s no limit to how rapidly manufacturers can respond when consumers
demand more efficient and better-made products.”

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), commercial and
residential users in the U.S. used 412 billion kilowatthours of
electricity for lighting in 2014. Lighting accounted for 15 percent of
their total electricity use.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz says he believes the U.S. can achieve
it’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2025, but will
need “more arrows in the quiver” and “will require a legislative,
economy-wide approach” in the future.

Moniz made the comments at the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast in
Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. There he discussed the 2005 U.N.
international climate change agreement and what the U.S. will have to do
to meet it’s goals in greenhouse gas reduction of roughly 27% below
2005 levels.

“I think we have the tools to meet something like a 2025 goal,” Moniz
said. “But again the very deep de-carbonization is going to require more
arrows in the quiver and ultimately, I believe, will require a
legislative economy-wide approach.”

Moniz was asked if he thought the risks of failing to reach the 2025 greenhouse gas emission goals were political or technical.

“I think we have the technologies in hand combined with good policy, but
policy I’m not talking now about - what I think we eventually need,
which will be an economy-wide approach to carbon reductions and a
legislative approach,” Moniz said.

“But I mean policies like, continuing to promulgate efficiency standards
whether it’s for appliances, equipment or vehicles, buildings –
etcetera. Things of that type, I think we have the tools that we need to
meet something like the 2025 goal.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

24 April, 2016

"Renewables" are alone enough?

The bright-eyed Warmist guy below -- Mark Diesendorf -- is
triumphant in thinking that he has shown that there is no need for
hydrocarbon-fuelled baseload power stations. What he argues below
(in summary) has some logic in that although renewable power sources
have very uneven availability by themselves, a whole network of
renewable sources is more reliable. So if everything is interconnected,
you might be able to get power from solar cells when the wind isn't
blowing and vice versa. Because it does happen that all renewable
sources are not always available in the quantities demanded, he
does however concede that reliance on other sources -- such as gas
turbines -- would sometimes be required.

Clearly, however, such a
system would require a lot of very tricky management and good luck for
there always be some power source available. And lot more
transmission lines -- which are both costly and eyesores -- would be
required to get the geographical spead needed to overcome the localism
of things like clouds and wind. The wind can be blowing in one
place and not in another place nearby, for instance. So to have a
useful spread of inputs you would need generators scattered far and wide
-- and all sorts of new and expensive transmission lines from them to a
central core or elsewhere. And the NIMBYs would block you at every step
along the way when you try to build those transmission lines.

And
the backup gas-powered generators needed to fill in when nature is
unobliging would have to be very powerful. On those occasions at
night when the wind isn't blowing, the gas generators would have to be
capable of assuming the whole load. So in the end you still end up
with huge hydrocarbon-powered generators. So where is the
benefit? A benefit to Warmist ideology only, it seems.
You would still have to double up your power generating capacity.

And "renewable" power sources require much larger capital
investment per megawatt so you are looking at spending something like
three times what you need to in order to get an acceptable electricity
service. But money seems to grow on trees in the Greenie
imagination so I suppose they dismiss that with a wave of their hands

I suppose I should briefly mention the main two other sources of "renewable" power -- solar furnaces and hydro-electricity.

Solar
furnaces are easy. They do not remotely live up to their promises
and the two big ones -- Ivanpah in California and Abengoa in Spain --
have just been hit by huge cost over-runs. Obama may bail out
Ivanpah but it would just be pouring money down a hole if he did.
Its running costs far exceed what it can get for its power. And
the Spanish government will probably just have to switch their
installation off -- if they have not done so already.

And
building new hydroelectric installations is a laugh. They all require
big DAMS -- and, in their strange superstitious way, there is nothing a
Greenie hates more than a dam.

So I think we have to conclude
that Mr Diesendorf is up the creek in a barbed-wire canoe without a
paddle -- as Barry Humphries puts it

The assumption that baseload power stations are necessary to provide a
reliable supply of grid electricity has been disproven by both practical
experience in electricity grids with high contributions from renewable
energy, and by hourly computer simulations.

In 2014 the state of South Australia had 39% of annual electricity
consumption from renewable energy (33% wind + 6% solar) and, as a
result, the state’s base-load coal-fired power stations are being shut
down as redundant. For several periods the whole state system has
operated reliably on a combination of renewables and gas with only small
imports from the neighbouring state of Victoria.

The north German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein
are already operating on 100% net renewable energy, mostly wind. The
‘net’ indicates trading with each other and their neighbours. They do
not rely on baseload power stations.

A host of studies agree: baseload power stations are not needed

“That’s cheating”, nuclear proponents may reply. “They are relying on
power imported by transmission lines from baseload power stations
elsewhere.” Well, actually the imports from baseload power stations are
small.

For countries that are completely isolated (e.g. Australia) or almost
isolated (e.g. the USA) from their neighbours, hourly computer
simulations of the operation of the electricity supply-demand system,
based on commercially available renewable energy sources scaled up to
80-100% annual contributions, confirm the practical experience.

In the USA a major computer simulation by a large team of scientists and
engineers found that 80-90% renewable electricity is technically
feasible and reliable (They didn’t examine 100%.) The 2012 report,
Renewable Electricity Futures Study. Vol.1. Technical report
TP-6A20-A52409-1 was published by the US National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL). The simulation balances supply and demand each hour.

The report finds that “renewable electricity generation from
technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a
more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of
total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity
demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.”

Similar results have been obtained from hourly simulation modeling of
the Australian National Electricity Market with 100% renewable energy
(published by Ben Elliston, Iain MacGill and I in 2013 and 2014) based
on commercially available technologies and real data on electricity
demand, wind and solar energy. There are no baseload power stations in
the Australian model and only a relatively small amount of storage.
Recent simulations, which have yet to be published, span eight years of
hourly data.

These, together with studies from Europe, find that baseload power
stations are unnecessary to meet standard reliability criteria for the
whole supply-demand system, such as loss-of-load probability or annual
energy shortfall.

Furthermore, they find that reliability can be maintained even when
variable renewable energy sources, wind and solar PV, provide major
contributions to annual electricity generation, up to 70% in Australia.
How is this possible?

Fluctuations balanced by flexible power stations

First, the fluctuations in variable wind and solar PV are balanced by
flexible renewable energy sources that are dispatchable, i.e. can supply
power on demand. These are hydro with dams, Open Cycle Gas Turbines
(OCGTs) and concentrated solar thermal power (CST) with thermal storage,
as illustrated in

Incidentally the gas turbines can themselves be fuelled by ‘green gas’,
for example from composting municipal and agricultural wastes, or
produced from surpluses of renewable electricity. More on this below …

Second, drawing on diverse renewable energy sources, with different
statistical properties, provides reliability. This means relying on
multiple technologies and spreading out wind and solar PV farms
geographically to reduce fluctuations in their total output. This
further reduces the already small contribution from gas turbines to just
a few percent of annual electricity generation.

Third, new transmission lines may be needed to achieve wide geographic
distribution of renewable energy sources, and to multiply the diversity
of renewable energy sources feeding into the grid. For example, an
important proposed link is between the high wind regions in north
Germany and the low wind, limited solar regions in south Germany. Texas,
with its huge wind resource, needs greater connectivity with its
neighbouring US states.

Fourth, introducing ‘smart demand management’ to shave the peaks in
electricity demand and to manage periods of low electricity supply, can
further increase reliability. This can be assisted with smart meters and
switches controlled by both electricity suppliers and consumers, and
programmed by consumers to switch off certain circuits (e.g. air
conditioning, water heating, aluminium smelting) for short periods when
demand on the grid is high and/or supply is low.

As summarized by the NREL study: “RE (Renewable Energy) Futures finds
that increased electricity system flexibility, needed to enable
electricity supply-demand balance with high levels of renewable
generation, can come from a portfolio of supply- and demand-side
options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new
transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system
operations.”

A recent study by Mark Jacobson and colleagues went well beyond the
above studies. It showed that all energy use in the USA, including
transport and heat, could be supplied by renewable electricity. The
computer simulation used synthetic data on electricity demand, wind and
sunshine taken every 30 seconds over a period of six years.

Storage or ‘windgas’ could also manage fluctuations

The above ‘flexible’ approach may not be economically optimal for the UK
and other countries with excellent wind resource but limited solar
resource. Another solution to managing fluctuations in wind and solar is
more storage, e.g. as batteries or pumped hydro or compressed air.

A further alternative is the ‘windgas’ scenario recently advocated by
Energy Brainpool as a greener and lower cost alternative to the UK’s
Hinkley C nuclear project. The idea is to use excess wind energy to
produce hydrogen gas by electrolysing water and then convert the
hydrogen to methane that fuels combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power
stations.

In fact, not all the hydrogen needs to be converted into methane, and
it’s more efficient to keep some of it as hydrogen, a useful fuel in its
own right. Another option is to use the hydrogen to make ammonia (NH3)
which can both be used as a fuel, and as a feedstock for the fertiliser
industry, displacing coal or natural gas.

In Brainpool’s scenario, the system is used to replicate the power
output of the 3.2GW Hinkley C nuclear power station, and shows it can be
done at a lower cost. But in fact, it gets much better than that:

as each wind turbine, CCGT, gas storage unit and
‘power to gas’ facility is completed, its contribution begins
immediately, with no need for the whole system to be built out;

the system would in practice be used to provide, not
baseload power, but flexible power to meet actual demand, and so would
be much more valuable;

as solar power gets cheaper, it will integrate with
the system and further increase resilience and reduce cost;

the whole system creates grid stability and cannot
drop out all at once like a nuclear plant, producing negative
‘integration costs’.

But in all the flexible, renewables-based approaches set out above,
conventional baseload power stations are unnecessary. In the words of
former Australian Greens’ Senator Christine Milne: “We are now in the
midst of a fight between the past and the future”.

The refutation of the baseload fairy tale and other myths falsely denigrating renewable energy are a key part of that struggle.

Because there are no other more important issues to fact check, the
folks over at FactCheck.org decided to investigate Sarah Palin’s claim
that she’s “as much a scientist” as the star of the children’s
television show, “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

Of course they found in Nye’s favor:

But check this out. To help prove that Nye is a real scientist, they
cited his honorary degrees. You know, degrees that are actually awards
and not really degrees at all:

Nye has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell. He also has six
honorary doctorate degrees, including Ph.D.s in science from Goucher
College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Sorry, guys, but that’s not how it works. Why not cite any of Nye’s numerous peer-reviewed papers instead?

Oh, that’s right … because he has none. From The Federalist:

It does not appear that Nye has published a single paper in a
peer-reviewed journal of any kind; his chief scientific exploits of the
past 20 years or so appear to be tinkering with sundials and making
public speaking appearances to talk about how great science is.

His most recent high-profile contribution to “science” was to publicly
debate a creationist over whether the Earth is 6,000 years old—a
functionally useless endeavor, though I’m sure it made for a great
Twitter hashtag.

For this year’s rendition of Earth Day, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
More than 130 nations will gather to formally sign the Paris Climate
Agreement at the United Nations in New York. Nothing could better
signify Earth Day than a global gaggle of government leaders burning
fossil fuels on their way to forcing us to spend a lot of green to
preserve a little green, all while expanding their control over our
lives.

While Congress has not ratified the agreement — nor are there any plans
to — the Obama administration argues that its own assent is all that is
necessary. Once 55 or more nations that represent 55% of global
greenhouse gas emissions sign, the Paris accord can become effective as
early as November 2017. The United States and China, which has also
pledged to sign, together make up 38% of emissions. Meanwhile, a number
of smaller nations are willing to sign in the hope of becoming
beneficiaries of the inevitable wealth transfer the UN is sure to
facilitate.

We’ve talked about the racket known as Earth Day many times on these
pages, but climate alarmists are now shrieking that 2016 will be the
warmest year on record, and that we have to DO SOMETHING before the
global average temperature rises more than two degrees Celsius from
pre-industrial values. “We are at a critical juncture when it comes to
preserving our climate,” warned Michael Mann, the “climate researcher”
who’s best known for the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global
temperatures over the centuries, and for his omission of relevant data
that failed to support his theory.

Unfortunately, no one has conclusively proven that our current climate
is the optimal or “normal” one, either. Did you know, for example, as
“skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg points out, that about 0.5%
of all deaths are heat-related, while more than 7% are cold-related?

It’s worth noting too that climate alarmists aren’t the only ones
predicting a record warm year. Climate “deniers” like meteorologist Joe
Bastardi have been forecasting higher temperatures this year because of
weather patterns.

Despite all that, Barack Obama is plunging head-first into the Paris
agreement as a continuation of his quest to wipe out the coal industry
through power plant regulations and keeping other abundant energy
sources off limits.

Yet not only is there a cost in jobs lost in the energy sector, but also
a real increase in what’s known as “green energy poverty,” an economic
condition where families spend more than 10% of their income on heating
and other domestic energy costs. While the relatively low price of
natural gas helps keep heating costs down, government subsidies and
outright mandates for “renewable energy,” such as wind and solar power,
bend the cost curve upward — sort of like a hockey stick.

Yet a change in administration, such as one to Ted Cruz, or, to a lesser
extent, Donald Trump, will provide little relief from the Paris
provisions. Buried in the Paris Climate Agreement is language preventing
any nation from withdrawing within the first three years after it takes
effect, with a further cooling-off period of one year. In essence,
given a possible effective date of November 2017, the next president is
stuck with this agreement. One silver lining is that there is little in
the way of strict enforcement, as that would make the agreement a treaty
requiring Senate ratification, something Obama scrupulously sought to
avoid.

So let’s recap: Today we celebrate a completely fabricated holiday
(which, no small irony, occurs on the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s
birth) by signing an agreement of dubious legality and limited
enforcement mechanisms in order for do-gooders to try to solve a problem
that mankind has little, if anything, to do with. Sounds like a perfect
example of liberalism to us. (Read more about the Left’s “Real ‘Climate
Change’ Agenda.”)

How do you cap an oil gusher? If you were a wildcatter in East Texas
during the 1930s, you would fashion a rig using any manner of tools
available to contain the gooey liquid until you could profitably deliver
it to energy-thirsty consumers. If you were President Obama, however,
you might focus on one particular method: plugging up the wild well with
the latest edition of the Federal Code of Regulation and hope that
consumers didn’t notice at the gas pump. According to Independent
Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II, this is pretty much what
the White House has done by enacting regulations that erode the
benefits consumers would otherwise derive from the recent energy boom.

“The administration has zeroed in on the [oil and gas] industry with new
rules on hydraulic fracturing, natural gas flaring, and methane
emissions, to name but a few,” Shughart writes in American Thinker. Toss
in the president’s nixing of the Keystone XL pipeline and moratorium on
energy exploration in the Arctic and Atlantic coastal waters, and you
have ample evidence that President Obama dislikes fossil fuels so much
that he’s willing to inflict significant harm on the industry. Now the
president is proposing to raise taxes on crude oil by $10 per barrel—a
move that would push up gas prices about 24 cents per gallon, according
to one industry analyst.

The administration sees the tax hike as an opportunity—to bolster his
environmental street cred and to fund resource-wasting mass transit
projects and subsidies to R&D on self-driving cars—as if Google,
Ford and the other corporate behemoths currently pursuing that
technology need the money. Doubtless his proposed tax hike will please
special interests but not the economy as a whole. “Cronyism, whether to
benefit renewables or fossil fuels, is a serious problem,” Shughart
continues. “Robust economic growth will return if and only if Washington
gets out of the way.”

Secretary of State John Kerry will join leaders from around the world to
sign the Paris Protocol global warming agreement this Friday at the
United Nations headquarters.

Here are the top five reasons Congress and the next administration should withdraw from the accord:

1) Higher energy bills, fewer jobs and a weaker economy.

The economic impact of domestic regulations associated with the Paris
agreement will be severe. To meet America’s commitment to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions, the administration will need to drive the cost of
conventional fuels higher so households and businesses use less.

Because energy is a necessary input for almost all goods consumers buy,
households are hit by higher prices multiple times over. Global warming
regulations will increase electricity expenditures for a family of four
by at least 13 percent a year. Cumulatively, they will cost American
families over $20,000 of lost income by 2035 and impose a $2.5 trillion
hit on the economy.

2) No impact on climate.

Regardless of one’s opinions on the degree to which climate change is
occurring, regulations associated with the Paris accord will have no
meaningful impact on the planet’s temperature.

Even if the government closed the doors to every businesses and
CO2-emitting activity in the U.S., there would be less than two-tenths
of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures.

Even Kerry admitted during the negotiations last December that:

If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions— remember what
I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions—
it wouldn’t’t be enough, not when more than 65 percent of the world’s
carbon pollution comes from the developing world.

Though the Paris Protocol is an international agreement, there is little
reason to believe that the developing world (India, China, etc.) will
prioritize reducing cargo dioxide emissions over using affordable energy
that provides their citizens with a better standard of living.

Yes, China and other developing countries have serious air and water
quality problems from industrial byproducts. But do not associate those
problems with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless
and non-toxic. The focus of the Paris Protocol is to address
catastrophic global warming. The developing world has more pressing
tangible environmental challenges, which they’ll be able to address when
they’re wealthier and have the necessary means to tackle them.

3) Massive taxpayer-funded wealth transfer for green initiatives.

An important part of the Paris agreement for the developing world is
money. More specifically, other peoples’ money. In Nov. 2014, President
Barack Obama also pledged to commit $3 billion to the Green Climate
Fund, an international fund for green projects in the developing world.

The administration and proponents of a Green Climate Fund have
repeatedly called for spending $100 billion per year between the United
States and other countries in public and private financing to combat
climate change.

In March, the Obama administration made a $500 million taxpayer-funded
payment to the Green Climate Fund despite Congress never having
authorized the funding.

The Green Climate Fund is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded wealth
transfer from developed countries to developing ones. The fund will do
little to promote economic growth in these countries but instead connect
politically-connected companies with taxpayer dollars.

4) Avoids review and consent from elected officials.

The Paris agreement is in form, in substance, and in the nature of its
commitments a treaty and should be submitted to the Senate for review
and consent. The executive branch has shown contempt for the U.S.
treaty-making process and the role of Congress, particularly the Senate.

As my colleague Steven Groves writes and explains in great detail, “The
argument that the U.S. Nationally Determined Contribution “targets and
timetables” are not legally binding and therefore the Paris Agreement is
not a “treaty” requiring the advice and consent of the Senate simply
has no basis in law.”

5) A top-down, government controlled push for economic transformation.

To achieve their global warming goals, international leaders want to
control an economic transformation. Christiana Figueres, executive
secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has
said that:

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting
ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to
change the economic development model that has been reigning for at
least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.

A top-down, concentrated effort to shift away from the use of coal, oil
and natural gas will prevent millions from enjoying the basic energy
needs Americans and the developed world takes for granted. In the
industrialized world, the effects of moving away from conventional fuels
have been devastating at times. Fuel poverty and pricier energy caused
tens of thousands of deaths in Great Britain because families could not
heat their homes. The world runs on traditional fuels because they are
cost competitive and abundant. If and when any transformative shift away
from these natural resources occurs, it will be driven by the market.

The Paris agreement, and U.S. participation in the entire framework
convention on climate change is a raw deal for Americans. The next
administration should not only withdraw from Paris but the entire United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Australian scientists write open letter demanding action on Great
Barrier Reef as 93 per cent of the reef has been affected by coral
bleaching due to climate change

But what CAN the government do if it's due to climate change?
They want the government to stop all coal usage but that would do
nothing for the reef. The proportion of CO2 added to the
atmosphere by the burning of coal in Australia is minuscule. The
whole thing is just a cynical and dishonest attempt to push their usual
barrows by exploiting something that is almost certainly due to the El
Nino weather oscillation and not to "climate change"

Dozens of Australian scientists have penned a letter to express major
concern for the Great Barrier Reef, which is currently undergoing its
worst coral bleaching in history.

The letter signed by 56 scientists urged the government to make phasing
out fossil fuels and coal a major priority to save the reef.

'We are now seeing first hand the damage that climate change causes, and
we have a duty of care to speak out,' the open letter stated.

'In addition, there can be no new coal mines. No new coal-fired power
stations. The transition to a renewables-led energy system, already
underway, must be greatly accelerated.'

The letter, published in The Courier-Mail as an advert, cost the $14,000
to publish and was funded by a the Climate Council successfully raised
money from 250 sponsors.

A report by news.com.au noted the letter was published in the same week
it was revealed 93 per cent of the world's largest reef was affected by
coral bleaching, the worst case in recorded history.

Organisations are demanding further action from the federal government,
with WWF Australia pushing for 100 per cent renewable electricity by
2035 and net zero carbon pollution before 2050, according to the report.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

22 April, 2016

Blatant and dishonest propaganda from Bill Nye

So Bill Nye, the elementary “Science Guy” (we prefer the more accurate
phrase “Science Lie”), is taking on Patriot Post contributor and veteran
meteorologist Joe Bastardi. Posing with a fabricated hard copy of a
Post publication in his latest video, Nye responds directly to
Bastardi’s November column, “Some Questions for Bill Nye Six Years After
Our ‘O'Reilly Factor’ Debate.” Nye’s challenge? “Mr. Bastardi, I will
bet you $10,000. I predict that the year 2016 will be among the top ten
hottest years ever recorded. … I’ll take it up a notch. I’ll bet you
another $10,000 that the decade 2010-2020 will prove to be the hottest
decade ever recorded.”

Bastardi has been quite public about forecasting a warm 2016 since last
year. Nye is apparently unaware of this, so he resorted to a straw man.
Why would Joe bet against his own forecast? Note also that Nye did not
accept Bastardi’s challenge after the El Niño of 2010. Bottom line: The
El Niño spike was predicted well in advance. Isn’t it ironic that Nye is
responding to the piece several months later — once the spike occurred
as forecasted? He should take the $20,000 he would have lost after 2010
and put it toward helping feed starving people, or the homeless — either
is a far more pressing problem. Nobody denies that the climate is
changing — in fact, with every breath you exhale, it changes. But on the
assumption that global temperatures are warming, the question is, “Why
is the climate changing?” Bastardi addresses that question here.

Nye calls Joe a “climate change denier,” which is the Left’s catch-all
moniker for those who do not attribute “global warming” exclusively to
human activity, or advocate the ecofascist prescriptions for dealing
with that change. Recall that when global cooling trends challenged the
“global warming” rhetoric of Al Gore and his ecofascists, they adopted
the ubiquitous alternative “climate change,” which can encompass the
whole range of climate phenomena — colder, hotter, wetter, dryer,
calmer, stormier, etc. Of course, the Left’s real underlying political
agenda is not about “climate change” at all, but big government control.
The real deniers are those who refuse to recognize that the sun, the
earth, stochastic events and the very design of the system far outweigh
the effects of the increase of one molecule of CO2 out of every 10,000
molecules of air over a 100-year period.

On a final note, Mr. Conservationist printed a faux paper copy of The
Patriot Post, which is an online publication. What a waste! Consider all
the CO2 that did not get absorbed because a poor tree was butchered for
a “climate change” prop.

All the critics are long-time Warmists. Only one has claims to be a climate scientist

Some of the world's most eminent scientists have written to the editor
of UK newspaper The Times to complain about its coverage of climate
science.

They suggest the newspaper may be unduly influenced by the Global
Warming Policy Foundation, which, despite its name, denies humans are
causing climate change.

Baron John Krebs, a highly decorated biologist is behind the push,
writing that the newspaper has become a "laughing stock" for publishing
poor quality science.

"The implications for your credibility extend beyond your energy and climate change coverage," he said in the letter.

"Why should any reader who knows about energy and climate change respect
your political analysis, your business commentary, even your sports
reports, when in this one important area you are prepared to prioritise
the marginal over the mainstream?"

The letter was signed by Krebs and 12 other peers, including:

Baron Robert 'Bob' May, a former chief scientist of the UK

Baron Martin Rees of Ludlow, the Astronomer Royal

Baron Julian Hunt of Chesterton, former chief executive of the British Meteorological Office

Baron David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields

The peers took particular issue with two articles by environment editor
Ben Webster, both of which were republished by The Australian.

One article - Planet is not overheating, says Professor - reported on
science which was sponsored by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has five peers of its own on
its board of trustees, describes itself as "open-minded on the
contested science of global warming".

"[M]any of the sub-standard news stories and opinion pieces appear to concern, in some way, GWPF," it said.

"Whether any newspaper should involve itself repeatedly with any
pressure group is a matter for debate; it would be deeply perturbing to
find that a paper as eminent as The Times could allow a small NGO,
particularly one whose sources of financing are unknown, a high degree
of influence."

They said the second article - Scientists 'are exaggerating carbon threat to marine life' - misrepresented good science.

A follow-up opinion piece from a Times columnist "in either ignorance or
disregard" failed to mention the scientist's criticism of the Times'
report on his work.

"As Editor, you are of course entitled to take whatever editorial line
you feel is appropriate. Are you aware, however, how seriously you may
be compromising The Times' reputation by pursuing a line that cleaves so
tightly to a particular agenda, and which is based on such flimsy
evidence?" the peers wrote.

"Climate science has proven remarkably robust to repeated scrutiny, and
multiple lines of evidence indicate that climate change and ocean
acidification pose serious and increasing risks for the future."

The community of Warrenton, Oregon, successfully stonewalled the
construction of a terminal that would have exported liquefied natural
gas overseas in their town. Since 2012, Oregon LNG wanted to build the
terminal and an 87-mile pipeline that would ferry the gas that
originated in Canada. But over concerns that the terminal would gas the
environment and damage the local economy, local government blocked the
proposal that would have created 150 jobs in the area. So Oregon LNG
decided to drop the project.

Democrat lawmakers like Sen. Ron Wyden celebrated the job-crushing news.
“I am relieved that local voices prevailed,” he said in a statement.
But Democrats and the Obama administration were not so hostile to
liquefied natural gas in the past. Indeed, they used to see the stuff as
a future green energy. In 2012, the Obama administration envisioned
vehicles running on liquefied natural gas providing a clean-burning
alternative to oil-guzzling trucks. But in a few years, gas has turned
from hero to villain to the Left.

“Build the terminal in a more jobs friendly location and let them reap
the benefits,” wrote Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw. “The good citizens in
Warrenton, meanwhile, can smoke their corn cob pipes and stare out
across their empty bay, enjoying the sounds of the wind, the waves, and
the unemployed people camping out near the beach.”

Some way or another, this nation needs energy. Maybe the folks of
Warrenton would like some wind turbines, that energy source that whines
all the time and kills birds.

Global warming is making weather BETTER: 80 per cent of Americans are benefiting from nicer conditions than 40 years ago

The warming concerned is that which took place in the '80s and '90s

For years scientists studying climate change have issued doom-laden
warnings about the catastrophic results of burning fossil fuels and
emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But four out of five Americans are experiencing far better weather now
than they did forty years ago thanks to global warming, according to a
new study.

Researchers say because of this most US citizens believe global warming
is beneficial - but they also warn the good weather is not going to
last.

Winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the US since the
1970s, but at the same time, summers have not become more
uncomfortable.

This means the weather has shifted toward a temperate year-round climate that most Americans say they prefer.

The study showed that 80 per cent of US citizens live in places where the weather has improved over the last forty years.

This is one of the reasons it has been difficult to motivate US citizens
to tackle global warming, the authors of the new study have said.

'Weather patterns in recent decades have been a poor source of
motivation for Americans to demand policies to combat the climate change
problem,' said Professor Megan Mullin from Duke University, co-author
of the study.

Professor Mullin and Professor Patrick Egan from New York University
studied 40 years of daily weather data, from 1974 to 2013, on a
county-by-county basis to evaluate how the population's experience with
weather changed during this period, which is when climate change first
emerged as a public issue.

They found that Americans on average have experienced a rise in January
maximum temperatures, an increase of 0.58 °C (1.04 °F) per decade. By
contrast, daily maximum temperatures in July rose by only 0.07 °C (0.13
°F) per decade.

Humidity in the summer has also declined since the mid 1990s.

This means, winter temperatures have become warmer for virtually all
Americans while summer conditions have remained relatively constant.

Senate Indian Affairs Chairman John Barrasso (R,-Wyo.) and Vice Chairman
John Tester (D.-Mont.) agreed Wednesday to subpoena Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy or a top aide to
appear at an upcoming oversight field hearing on the Gold King Mine
disaster scheduled for April 22nd in Phoenix.

The subpoena - the first issued by the committee since its investigation
into the activities of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2004 – included
Assistant EPA Administrator Mathy Stanislaus.

The committee said Stanislaus was “invited to testify at the field hearing, but the EPA declined to send him.”

Barrasso pointed out that during her confirmation hearing, McCarthy
“agreed under oath” to appear before congressional committees with
oversight authority over her agency.

“It troubles me that this committee had to take the extraordinary
step of issuing a subpoena to a confirmed federal official,” Barrasso
said Wednesday.

“During the confirmation process, Gina McCarthy agreed under oath that
if confirmed, she would appear before congressional committees with
respect to her responsibilities.

“She further agreed under oath to ensure testimony in other documents
would be provided to congressional committees in a timely manner.

"Despite the sworn testimony, the EPA refused to provide any witnesses –
any witnesses - to the committee field hearing to be held on April 22,
2016 in Phoenix, Arizona,” Barrasso said.

“That hearing would continue our oversight on the EPA’s response to the
devastating toxic spill that it had caused, and of the agency’s
responsibility to the Indian communities that it had harmed.

“I am troubled further that the EPA would disregard such failures and
attempt to avoid the responsibility by refusing to appear before the
committee and answer questions.

"This sort of behavior is unbecoming of any federal official and won’t
be tolerated,” he continued. “The subpoena will be served on the EPA
later today.”

Mike Danylak, the committee’s press secretary, confirmed to CNSNews.com
that the subpoenas were served to McCarthy and Stanislaus on Wednesday
afternoon, but that as of noon on Friday, the committee had received no
response.

Last August 5th, EPA released three million gallons of toxic wastewater
from the abandoned Gold King Mine, contaminating rivers and streams in
Colorado, New Mexico and Utah as well as lands belonging to the Navajo
Nation and the Southern Ute Reservation.

In a March 16 statement, Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye said
that “the Navajo Nation has suffered due to the reckless actions of the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other responsible parties, and
the Obama Administration has turned down virtually every request we have
made for greater assistance, each time referring us back to the EPA.”

On Dec. 9, 2015, following the Department of Interior’s (DOI) “technical
evaluation” of the spill, Sec. Sally Jewell told Congress that “we did
not see any deliberate attempt to breach a mine. It was an accident.”
Jewell also said that “EPA’s trying to do a job of cleaning up a problem
it did not create.”

However, an investigative report released February 11 by the House
Natural Resources Committee “revealed that each of the three reports
issued by EPA and DOI in 2015 contains numerous errors and omissions and
demonstrably false information… [including the] false claim that the
EPA crew was digging high when the plug [sealing the mine] somehow
eroded on its own.”

If you’re a politician, activist, or reporter (Group 3 as Lindzen calls
it in the video), you should probably stick with Bill Nye.

Granted, Nye’s credentials aren’t nearly as impressive as Lindzen’s, and
he often behaves like a rodeo clown, but he buys in to the climate
change hysteria that is so beloved by politicians who seek wealth and
power, activists who need a grand cause to champion, and those media
that thrive on doomsday headlines.

In fact, Nye says he’s comfortable with jail terms for those who dare to challenge climate change “science”!

On the other hand, if you haven’t bought in to climate-change hysteria
just yet, you may want to hear first from Lindzen in the Prager
University 5-minute video below. After that, if you still want to jump
on the climate-change bandwagon, thereby avoiding a Bill-Nye-recommended
jail sentence, at least you’ll have done it with your eyes open.

In one sense, I suppose Lindzen has been a fool. He could have
sacrificed his integrity long ago by falsifying data, perverting its
interpretation, and/or outright lying in print in exchange for massive
federal grants to “prove” the mythical “scientific consensus” about
anthropogenic climate change (aka global warming).

Sadly, Lindzen has allowed himself to be swayed by hard data, objective
analysis, and the scientific method. Apparently he is among those who
insist that:

If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. And if it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Too bad for Prof. Lindzen. He could end up in prison next to the other ‘deniers’.

How about you?

Afterword:

Okay, okay, so this article is kind of sarcastic and silly. Imagine
comparing a science clown like Bill Nye to a top-tier atmospheric
physicist like Richard Lindzen. No one should take this seriously,
right?

Wrong.

See also this link or simply Google “climate change deniers Loretta Lynch” and see what comes up.

This is all deadly serious. The US Attorney General is giving serious
consideration to prosecuting real scientists who dare to challenge the
“settled science” of climate change. What’s next? Ordinary citizens who
ask legitimate questions about it?

If American
leftists/neo-Marxists/progressives/statists/Stalinists/Maoists/whatever-ists
can criminalize scientific inquiry, what do you think they’ll do with
political speech they don’t like?

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

21 April, 2016

Camera traps show animals have reclaimed Chernobyl's radioactive wasteland 30 years after the disaster -- and are in good health

Thus showing as completely wrong the Greenie claim that even tiny
amounts of radioactivity are harmful. Chernobyl shows that even
quite high levels are not harmful. Radioactivity has been much
demonized for political reasons. Radioactive leaks from nuclear power
plants will not do harm unless you are very close to them.

In other evidence of low harm from radioactivity, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of a small number of Japanese to live through both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear detonations.

He
was only only 3 km away from the epicenter on both occasions. He was
badly burned by the heat but he recovered from that and lived to
93.

Exactly 30 years and one week ago, a small town in the former Soviet
Union witnessed the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen.

Following a fire in one of its reactors, an explosion at the Chernobyl
power plant in the former Soviet Union town of Pripyat leaked
radioactive material into the environment and saw the surrounding area
evacuated.

But while radiation levels in the region is still considered too high
for humans to return, wildlife has moved back into the area and is
flourishing.

Studies of the animals and plants in the area around Chernobyl are now
providing clues as to what the world would be like should humans
suddenly disappear.

The exclusion zone is still in effect around the site of the disaster in
what is now Ukraine to protect people from the high levels of radiation
which persist in the environment.

But in the absence of human activity, wildlife has flourished ­– making the site a unique habitat for biologists to study.

Scientists are monitoring the health of plants and animals in the
exclusion area to see how they react to chronic radiation exposure.

Camera traps set up by researchers have captured a stunning array of
local wildlife, including wolves, lynx, mouse, boars, deer, horses, and
many others, as they wander through the area.

It shows that three decades on from the disaster, the area is far from being a wasteland. Instead life is thriving there.

Using the motion-activated traps to get snapshots of wildlife at a
number of sites throughout the exclusion zone, researchers at the
University of Georgia have recorded 14 species of mammal.

In a study published this week in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and
the Environment, the Georgia group reports it found no evidence to
suggest that the areas with the highest levels of radiation were keeping
their numbers down, and that populations inside the exclusion zone are
doing well.

Sarah Webster, a graduate student working on the project and first
author of the study, told UGA Today: 'Carnivores are often in higher
trophic levels of ecosystem food webs, so they are susceptible to
bioaccumulation of contaminants.'

'Few studies in Chernobyl have investigated effects of contamination level on populations of species in high trophic levels.'

The exclusion zone, which covers a substantial area in Ukraine and some
of bordering Belarus, will remain in effect for generations to come,
until radiation levels fall to safe enough levels.

The region is called a 'dead zone' due to the extensive radiation which
persists. However, the proliferation of wildlife in the area contradicts
this and many argue that the region should be given over to the animals
which have become established in the area - creating a radioactive
protected wildlife reserve.

It would be expected that carnivores would receive extensive radioactive
exposure, both directly from the environment and water sources as well
as ingesting it through eating contaminated animals.

In the long-term, this accumulation of radioactive material would be
expected to be harmful to the top predators and would restrict their
number, but findings from the latest study don't seem to support this.

'We didn't find any evidence to support the idea that populations are
suppressed in highly contaminated areas,' said Dr James Beasley, a
biologist at Georgia and senior author of the paper.

'What we did find was these animals were more likely to be found in
areas of preferred habitat that have the things they need – food and
water.'

Other research groups working within the area, including the TREE
consortium, have found that endangered Przewalski's horses – released
into the exclusion zone in the 1990s – are breeding successfully.

In addition, the camera studies have identified a number of protected
bird species, including golden eagles and white tailed eagles.

Sure, there's been a recent temperature rise but is it caused by
human activity? They dodge that all-important question. They
admit that El Nino is partly responsible but fail to quantify or
correct for its influence. Scientists quantify. They don't
indulgle in hand-waving dismissals. Ergo, none of the guff below
is science.

So what is the science? The science is
that the first 8 of their 11 months of warming were at a time when there
was NO CO2 rise and hence no human cause. So the recent rise is
clearly an effect of El Nino only. Below is a great coverage of El
Nino effects, nothing more (excerpt only)

Last month marked the hottest March in modern history, setting the
longest heat streak in the 137 years of record-keeping, US officials
said.

The month's average global temperature of 12.7°C (54.9°F) was not only
the hottest March, but continues a record streak that started last May.

The combined average temperature in March was the highest for this month in the 1880–2016 record.

The temperature was 1.22°C (2.20°F) above the 20 century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F).

This surpassed the previous record set in 2015 by 0.32°C / (0.58°F), and
marks the highest monthly temperature departure on record.

March 2016 also marks the 11 consecutive month a global temperature
record has been broken, the longest such streak in 137 years.

After Receiving $191 Million in Taxpayer-Backed Loans, Spanish Solar Company Files for Bankruptcy

A Spanish solar energy company benefiting from $191 million in financing
from the Export-Import Bank declared bankruptcy last month, calling
into question whether the embattled agency will see repayment of the
tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-backed loans on its balance
sheets.

Abengoa, which operates worldwide, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in
U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., and has until the end of
October to restructure its $16.4 billion of debt.

According to Ex-Im’s records, the bank authorized more than $300 million
in loans and loan guarantees to Abengoa and its subsidiaries, with more
than a dozen transactions approved from 2007 to 2015.

Of the $316 million in financing Ex-Im authorized, the bank disbursed
$191 million to Abengoa and its subsidiaries, its records show. The bank
cancelled the remaining $125 million of outstanding credit, an Ex-Im
spokesman told The Daily Signal.

Ex-Im’s board of directors approved financing for four loan
guarantees—totaling $112.8 million—to an Abengoa subsidiary on June 29.
The bank’s charter expired the next day, on June 30, marking the first
time Ex-Im has experienced a lapse in its authority in its 81-year
history.

According to the bank’s spokesperson, Ex-Im’s exposure to the solar company totals $66.2 million.

With Abengoa’s questionable financial future, some question whether the
green energy company will be able to repay the taxpayer-backed financing
it received from Ex-Im.

“If they’re going under, they’re not going to repay their loans,”
Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s
Mercatus Center, told The Daily Signal.

A spokesman for Ex-Im told The Daily Signal the bank is continuing to
work with the company to ensure its outstanding debt is repaid.

“Ex-Im Bank has and will continue to closely monitor this situation, and
continues to work with all parties and creditors to recoup the
outstanding debt,” the spokesperson said in an email. “As with all
transactions of this nature, the bank’s exposure is covered by reserves,
which are funded by fees assessed on borrowers, not the taxpayers.”

Before Abengoa’s financial woes were made public, the company was
scrutinized in media reports for violating U.S. immigration law,
workplace safety codes, and environmental regulations, according to the
Washington Free Beacon.

In September 2013, the bank approved two loans totaling $33.6 million to
Abengoa for solar projects in Spain and South Africa. When the bank
authorized the loans, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a
Democrat, was one of 17 members serving on Ex-Im’s advisory board.

Richardson, who also served as secretary of the Department of Energy
under President Bill Clinton, was also a member of Abengoa’s
international advisory board at the same time.

Such ties between government agencies and private companies benefiting
from taxpayer-backed financing are not uncommon, de Rugy said, and often
times firms like Abengoa will “double dip” into several government
programs.

“I think what we see with Abengoa, it’s a perfect example of decisions
and due diligence that is not driven by how sound a project is, but that
is driven by politics,” de Rugy said.

From 2007 to 2014, for example, Abengoa received $3 billion in financial
assistance from both Ex-Im and the Department of Energy.

Through its 1705 loan program, the Department of Energy awarded the
solar company more than $2 billion in loan guarantees for the
construction of two solar plants in the U.S.: one in Phoenix, Ariz., and
a second in California’s Mojave Desert.

It was through the Department of Energy’s 1705 loan guarantee program that the now-defunct Solyndra also received financing.

“It just tells you everything that’s wrong with these programs,” de Rugy
said. “The decisions are made based on politics and who you know. The
more your know, the more double dipping you’re able to do.”

According to the New York Times, Abengoa said $1 billion of the loans
and loan guarantees it has received from the federal government have
been repaid. The company did not return The Daily Signal’s request for
comment.

Ex-Im provides taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees to foreign countries and companies for the purchase of U.S. products.

Bank officials often boast of Ex-Im’s 0.235 percent default rate and say it returns money to the Treasury each year.

But over the last year, Abengoa isn’t the only company to receive taxpayer-backed financing from Ex-Im and face financial woes.

NewSat, an Australian satellite company, benefited from $100 million in
Ex-Im loans from 2012 to 2014. The company filed for Chapter 15
bankruptcy in the United States last year.

The company’s bankruptcy—and the decision-making that led to it
receiving Ex-Im financing—was scrutinized by Republicans during a June
Financial Services Committee hearing, who said the deal was evidence
that the bank is “beyond broken.”

Lawmakers said NewSat handed Ex-Im a “$100-million loss” at the “expense of the taxpayers.”

A group defending ridgelines against wind energy development has filed a
complaint with the Vermont Attorney General’s office and the Federal
Trade Commission accusing local wind-power producers of making false
green marketing claims.

In a complaint filed March 15, the Irasburg Ridgeline Alliance alleges
that Renewable Energy Vermont, Georgia Mountain Community Wind and the
Burlington Electric Department engaged in consumer deception in their
descriptions and marketing of wind-generated electricity.

The citizen-led alliance claims that the organizations — a trade
association, a developer and an electric utility — advertise renewable
energy in marketing and promotions despite selling renewable energy
certificates, or RECs, to out-of-state entities.

The group asserts that by selling RECs out of state, the organizations
lose the basis for advertising their product as “renewable.” The
complaint states the three organizations are marketing wind-generated
renewable power in violation of the Vermont Consumer Protection Act, 9
V.S.A. § 2453(a), which prohibits “deceptive or unfair practices.”

“As far as what we know today, there is no so-called renewable project
in this state that has not sold its RECs out of state,” IRA spokesman
Michael Sanville told Vermont Watchdog. “That being (the case), there
should not be any company within the state that’s advertising any of
their energy generation as ‘renewable.’”

Sanville said at least one neighboring state, Connecticut, recently
complained about “double-booking” — a term used for counting renewable
energy twice — and considered prohibiting purchases of RECs generated in
Vermont. Sanville said the controversy led Sorrell to issue warnings to
the Vermont solar industry late last year. Likewise the FTC warned
Vermont energy companies in February 2015 not to make deceptive claims.

According to the alliance, the warnings didn’t prevent Renewable Energy
Vermont from continuing to promote “clean, green, and local” wind energy
in television advertisements. In one ad released in November, Renewable
Energy Vermont states that Vermont turbines power 46,200 homes with
wind energy, even though certificates identifying that renewable power
were sold to out-of-state entities for use in other states.

Also according to the alliance, a recent press release by the Burlington
Electric Department makes the claim that Georgia Mountain Community
Wind powers the local community with clean energy and provides “enough
renewable energy to power more than 5,500 Vermont households.”

The complaint notes that Burlington Electric and Georgia Mountain
Community Wind are members of the Renewable Energy Vermont trade
association, and questions whether the name “Renewable Energy Vermont”
also is an example of deceptive marketing.

The attorney general’s office is currently reviewing the IRA’s
complaint. Sanville said the group wants Sorrell to issue a
cease-and-desist order on all green marketing efforts, and to award
monetary damages.

Sanville said the IRA intends to hold the wind-energy producers’ feet to
the fire. He added that it would be hypocritical of the attorney
general’s office not to enforce Vermont’s consumer protection laws
against renewable energy producers after having investigated
anti-big-renewables activist Annette Smith in January for allegedly
“practicing law without a license.”

Dr. Ron Holland, of the IRA, said the producers have had “ample time and
warning to learn the Federal Trade Commission guidelines.”

“We are tired of Vermont companies making illegal claims that their
energy is renewable when it is not. That is why we took our concerns to
the Vermont Attorney General and the FTC,” Holland said in a statement.

Watchdog reached out to representatives from Burlington Electric
Department and Georgia Mountain Community Wind on Wednesday, but they
did not return our request for comment.

“If somebody wants to build a coal power plant, they can, it’s just that
it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum
for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” -- President Obama,
2008

It should come as no surprise that President Obama has succeeded in destroying the coal industry.

The latest evidence is the announcement by Peabody, the world’s largest
private coal company, that it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection. Peabody is one of a number of coal companies hit hard by the
drop in demand for coal to make steel as well as the emergence of cheap
and abundant natural gas supplied by the shale boom.

This is the conclusion of Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation.
Loris explains that the Obama administration’s destructive energy
policies go beyond the coal industry by noting that there are two sets
of energy companies.

First, there are companies such as Peabody, Arch Coal, Patriot Coal,
Alpha Natural Resources, James River Coal and Walter Energy. Second,
there are companies such as Solyndra, Abound Solar, Fisker Automotive,
Beacon Power, and Vehicle Production Group. Both sets of companies have
two things in common. They all have filed for bankruptcy and the federal
government had a role in their failure.

“The government’s role in bankrupting energy companies speaks to two
overarching problems with U.S. energy policy: overregulation and
subsidization,” Loris writes. “Eliminating heavy-handed regulations that
provide little to no environmental benefit and eliminating all energy
subsidies will enable energy innovations and drive growth and success in
the industry. Best of all, families and businesses will be the
beneficiaries of the most reliable energy at the most competitive
prices.”

Following are excerpts from Loris’s study of how regulation and subsidies destroy energy companies:

* According to a recent report by the Energy Information Administration
(EIA), more than 80 percent of the nearly 18 gigawatts of electric
generating capacity retired in 2015 was conventional steam coal. The EPA
cites the Mercury Air & Toxics regulation, which has enormous
compliance costs and minimal direct environmental benefits, with 30
percent of coal retirement in 2015.

* Global warming regulations will prevent the construction of new
coal-fired power plants and could cause more of America’s existing fleet
to retire. The Department of the Interior recently announced a
prohibition on leasing of public land to coal companies while it
“reviews” the leasing process (a procedure that will inevitably result
in making it more difficult and more expensive for coal companies to
lease federal land).

* And the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in the Department
of Labor have promulgated a host of new rules that will increase the
costs of mining coal and decision making authority away from individuals
and instead empower Washington regulators to micromanage operations.
Combined, the federal government’s regulations have had a Shaquille
O’Neal-sized hand in driving out coal production.

* Then there’s the second set of companies. Each bankrupt company in the
second group received taxpayer dollars as part of the Department of
Energy’s loan and loan guarantee programs. The government played a role
in their failures by dangling taxpayer dollars for investments in
alternative forms of energy technology, such as wind, solar or electric
vehicles. In each instance, DOE lent money to companies that could not
survive even help from the taxpayer.

* Private investors look at taxpayer-backed loans as a way to
substantially reduce their risk. Private companies can invest a smaller
amount than they otherwise would have to. The government’s involvement
in decisions that should be purely private investments skew the risk
calculation and have resulted in economic losers.

Attorney-General George Brandis has questioned the science of climate change, saying he's not "at all" convinced it is settled.

Labor has seized on comments by the senior Turnbull government minister
that there were a number of views about the cause of climate change,
arguing it proves the deep climate scepticism in the coalition.

"It doesn't seem to me that the science is settled at all," Senator
Brandis told parliament on Tuesday during debate on the tabling of
documents relating to the CSIRO.

The attorney-general was addressing a recent CSIRO restructure -
undertaken internally - which will move the focus away from collecting
climate data.

About 200 jobs are at risk, however the overall head count is expected to return to current levels within two years.

Senator Brandis said he wasn't embarking on the climate debate himself,
but challenging the illogical position of the Labor party. "But
I'm not a scientist, and I'm agnostic really on that question."

CSIRO head Larry Marshall said in an email to staff when announcing the
restructure that the question of climate change had been proved and it
was time to refocus on solutions to it.

However, scientists say without continuous data collection - some of
which is undertaken by the CSIRO in partnership with the Bureau of
Meteorology - huge gaps could form that could never be recovered.

Labor said the attorney-general's comments were breathtaking. "The
commitment of Senator Brandis to addressing the impacts of climate
change is so shallow, he hasn't made up his mind whether it actually
exists yet," environment spokesman Mark Butler and shadow
attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said in a statement.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership in 2009 in
part due to his commitment to climate change and an emissions trading
scheme. As a backbencher, he heavily criticised the coalition's
direct action climate policy.

Senator Brandis' office referred AAP to an interview conducted in 2014
in which the attorney-general told a reporter he was "on the side of
those who believed in anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming and
who believed something ought to be done about it."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

20 April, 2016

Could climate change lead to more food? Increased carbon dioxide could help wheat, rice and soybeans grow more efficiently

This study very cautiously states the bleeding obvious but it is a
nice change to see the modellers getting closer to reality --
after the barrage of one-eyed Greenie claims that global warming will
create food shortages

Bringing drought and increased temperatures, climate change has been
widely portrayed as a force that will leave staple food crops struggling
in many areas where they are grown today.

But a new study has shown that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere may actually lead to greater yields of key crops like
wheat, rice and soybeans.

Scientists say higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air helps plants
build up greater biomass but can also reduce the amount of water needed
to help them grow.

While the effects of a complex changing climate makes it difficult to
predict exactly how crops in different parts of the world will grow,
overall rising carbon dioxide levels could be beneficial.

Average levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen by more
than a quarter since 1960, and now sit at around 400 parts per
million. Plants take in carbon to build their tissues through
photosynthesis, and if there is more carbon around, the process is
easier.

Leaves take in air through tiny openings called stomata, but in the
process the stomata lose water. When more carbon is available, they
don't have to open up as much, and this saves water.

Until now most research looking into climate change has focussed on changes in temperature and rainfall.

Many studies indicate that as temperatures rise, crops across the world
will suffer as average temperatures become unsuitable for traditionally
grown crops, and droughts, heat waves or extreme bouts of precipitation
become more common.

But a large team of researchers have tried to predict the combined
effect of a variety of changing factors caused by climate change to take
into account the increase in carbon dioxide.

They introduced artificially heightened levels of carbon dioxide to farm fields, and measured the results on crop production.

Although the results are complicated, their research suggests some crops might grow better in 2080.

The study looked at how rising temperatures and carbon dioxide along
with changes in rainfall and cloud cover might combine to affect how
efficiently maize, soybeans, wheat, and rice can use water and grow.

The results confirmed heat and water stress alone will damage yields,
but when carbon dioxide is accounted for, all four crops will use water
more efficiently by 2080.

Based on the current biomass of these crops, the researchers predict
water-use efficiency will rise an average of 27 per cent in wheat, 18
per cent in soybeans, 13 per cent in maize, and 10 per cent in rice.

This does not mean more of them will grow, however.

Taking it all into account, the study projects that average yields of
current rain-fed wheat areas, mostly located in higher latitudes
including the US, Canada and Europe, might go up by almost 10 per cent,
while consumption of water would go down a corresponding amount.

But average yields of irrigated wheat, which account for much of India and China's production, could decline by 4 per cent.

Maize, according to the new projections, would still be a loser most
everywhere, even with higher water efficiency yields would go down about
8.5 per cent.

'To adapt adequately, we need to understand all the factors involved,'
said lead author Delphine Deryng, an environmental scientist at Columbia
University's Centre for Climate Systems Research, the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies and the University of Chicago's Computation
Institute.

She said the study should not be interpreted to mean that increasing
carbon dioxide is a good thing, but its direct effects must be included
in any calculation of what the future holds.

Taking it all into account, the study projects that average yields of
current rain-fed wheat areas, mostly located in higher latitudes
including the US, Canada and Europe, might go up by almost 10 per cent,
while consumption of water would go down a corresponding amount.

But average yields of irrigated wheat, which account for much of India and China's production, could decline by four per cent.

Maize, according to the new projections, would still be a loser most
everywhere, even with higher water efficiency yields would go down about
8.5 per cent.

Agricultural scientists say losses could be mitigated to some extent by
switching crops or developing varieties adapted to the new conditions.

But the researchers warned the uncertainties in the models are high,
because field experiments, which involve blowing carbon dioxide over
large farm fields for entire growing seasons, have only been done at a
handful of sites.

The study is less conclusive on the overall effects on rice and soybean
yields - half of the projections show an increase in yield and half a
net decline.

Bruce Kimball, a retired researcher with the US Department of
Agriculture who has studied crop-carbon dioxide interactions, said the
paper does 'a good job on a huge scale,' but 'more data from more crops
from more locations' is needed.

He also cautioned that previous research has shown that the benefits of
higher carbon dioxide levels tend to bottom out after a certain point,
but that the damage done by heat only gets worse as temperatures mount.

'Thus, for greater warming and higher CO2 the results would likely be more pessimistic than shown in this paper,' he said.

The ‘establishment’ is slow to learn; Senate Republicans pushing for more #GreenPork

By Marita Noon

In this election cycle, we hear a lot about the "establishment." Most
people are not really sure who they are, but they are sure that they do
not like them. The anger toward the establishment is not party specific
and has propelled two unlikely candidates: Donald Trump on the
Republican side and Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democrats.

The faithful following these outsiders may be more about "the grassroots
trying to teach the establishment a lesson," as Gary Bauer posited last
month, than about affection for either man. In an InfoWars video,
reporter Richard Reeves, at the University of Texas in Austin speaks to
Wyatt, a young man who’d just voted for Sanders. Wyatt indicates that
most of his fellow students likely voted for Sanders as well. The
surprise is his comment about the students’ second choice: "Donald
Trump." Why? He’s not "establishment." Wyatt admits he didn’t
consider voting for anyone else — just Sanders and Trump.

The establishment has been slow to grasp the public’s rejection of an increasingly distrusted political class.

However, one might define the "establishment," it certainly includes
long-time Washington politicians like Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Bill
Nelson (D-Fla.), Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who have just engaged in the
exact tactics that have fed the voter frustration aimed at them.
Avoiding a vigorous debate, they are using a must-pass bill to sneak
through millions in totally unrelated taxpayer giveaways to special
interests in the renewable energy industry—and they hope voters won’t
notice.

The bill is the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization
Act. On April 6, using an unrelated House bill (H.R. 636) that will
serve as the legislative shell for the Senate’s FAA measure (S. 2658),
the Senate began consideration to reauthorize the FAA for 18 months. It
is expected that the bill will be voted on this week, followed by the
House — which will take it up when it is back in session.

Funding for the FAA expired in September and received a 6-month
extension—which expired again on March 31. Avoiding a shutdown, Congress
passed another extension that President Obama signed on March 30. This
legislation authorized federal spending on aviation and related aviation
taxes through mid-July 2016.

Both the House and Senate have been grappling with a multi-year aviation
bill. Now, FAA reauthorization only has about two weeks to be debated
and approved before it will be shoved aside to make way for budget
proceedings. One major point of conflict is the renewable energy tax
breaks. Because the Senate FAA bill includes a tax title, it is open to
unrelated tax amendments.

Many renewable energy tax credits were extended in the omnibus spending
package that was passed late last year, but Democrats claim that in the
chaos of last minute negotiations, some were "unintentionally" left out.
According to Morning Consult, Thune said: "This is what [Democrats]
always viewed as the best opportunity to get some of these things that
were left out of last year’s extender bill." Senate Minority Leader Reid
announced: "the inclusion of the provisions is a requirement for the
legislation to move forward."

While many Republicans opposed the addition of the renewable energy tax
credits, provisions supporting investments in fuel cells, geothermal and
biomass were included in the Senate negotiations. Addressing the
Senate’s scramble to "settle on a cohesive strategy" regarding attaching
the renewable energy tax breaks to the bill, Politico reports: "House
Republicans have made it clear they’re not interested in renewing any of
the expired tax provisions this year." The bill’s coverage in Roter
Daily states: "key Republicans have already warned fellow House members
to oppose a deal on tax extenders if it comes out of the Senate, saying
they have consistently failed to promote economic growth and create
jobs."

As we have seen with the recent demise of government-funded,
green-energy projects, such tax credits and subsidies have repeatedly
failed to deliver on their promises of long-term job creation and
economic viability. It is for this reason that, on April 5, a coalition
of more than 30 organizations sent a letter to the Senate Finance
Committee expressing our deep opposition to the proposal. The letter, of
which I am a signatory, states: "Congress considered the matter of
expiring tax provisions less than 4 months ago. … It should also be
noted that Congress extended significantly favorable tax treatment to
renewable energy in omnibus appropriation legislation that accompanied
the aforementioned tax extender package."

Andrew Langer, President of the Institute for Liberty, who also signed
the letter, explains his position: "In December, Congress purposefully
allowed a series of tax credits for so-called ‘green’ energies to
expire. This was not some mere oversight as some have alleged, but a
purposeful recognition that as the energy landscape has changed, the
need to extend some two dozen of these credits was unwarranted. Others
were allowed to continue — but roughly $1.5 billion were not."

If you believe, as all the signatories to the letter do, that American
taxpayers shouldn’t have to prop up large, well-connected special
interests through tax handouts, carve outs, and loopholes using
unsustainable Washington spending, please let your representatives know
now. Please urge Senate offices to oppose keeping in the tax extenders,
and encourage House offices to oppose adding in extenders.

With our national debt totaling more than $19 trillion, the last thing
we need is more corporate welfare. But our legislators are slow to
learn. Senate Republicans, like Thune, who is the lead negotiator for
the Republicans, have worked with the Democrats to include the renewable
energy tax credits. Thune stated: "We’re listening to them and we’re
working for them."

No wonder the electorate is angry. But Washington politicians don’t get
it. While a battle rages over who will be the next president, unfazed,
the establishment continues on.

Langer concludes: "the political ramifications are clear, as history has
taught us. Republicans who give in to cronyism, who give in to
profligate spending… they get nothing in the end. Worse, they do
considerable damage to the concept that Republicans are the party of
lower spending and less government. In a political cycle where the
future is entirely uncertain for Republicans at all levels, those who
are pushing for these tax breaks do their colleagues no great service."

Join us in educating the "establishment" by calling them and telling them: "No more green pork!" #GreenPork

Europe’s suicidal green energy policies are killing at least 4o,000 people a year.

That’s just the number estimated to have died in the winter of 2014
because they were unable to afford fuel bills driven artificially high
by renewable energy tariffs.

But the real death toll will certainly be much higher when you take into
account the air pollution caused when Germany decided to abandon
nuclear power after Fukushima and ramp up its coal-burning instead; and
also when you consider the massive increase in diesel pollution –
the result of EU-driven anti-CO2 policies – which may be responsible for
as many as 500,000 deaths a year.

But even that 40,000 figure is disgraceful enough, given that greenies
are always trying to take the moral high ground and tell us that people
who oppose their policies are uncaring and selfish.

It comes from an article in the German online magazine FOCUS about
Energiewende (Energy Transition) – the disastrous policy I mentioned
earlier this week whereby Germany is committed to abandoning cheap,
effective fossil fuel power and converting its economy to expensive,
inefficient renewables (aka unreliables) instead.

According to FOCUS around ten percent of the European population are now
living in ‘energy poverty’ because electricity prices have risen, on
average, by 42 percent in the last eight years. In Germany alone this
amounts to seven million households.

The article is titled: The grand electricity lie: why electricity is becoming a luxury.

The reason, of course, is that green energy policies have made it that
way. Many of these have emanated from the European Union, which in turn
has taken its cue from the most Green-infested nation in Europe –
Germany.

Germany has long been obsessed with all things environmental. Besides
having invented the dodgy ‘science’ of ecology in the 1880s it was also,
of course, between 1933 and 1945 the home of Europe’s official
“Greenest government ever” – the first to ban smoking on public
transport, an enthusiastic supporter of organic food, national parks and
population control.

The Greens have also since the early Eighties been arguably the most
influential party in Germany. Though their percentage of the vote has
rarely risen above the 10 percent mark, they have punched above their
weight either as a coalition partner in government or as a pressure
group outside it.

For example, the reason that after Fukushima, Chancellor Angela Merkel
completely changed Germany’s policy on nuclear power was her terror of
the Greens who were suddenly polling 25 percent of the national vote.

It was the Greens too who were responsible for Energiewende – the policy
which is turning Germany into the opposite of what most of us imagine
it to be: not the economic powerhouse we’ve been taught to admire all
these years, but a gibbering basket case.

This becomes clear in an investigation by the German newspaper
Handelsblatt, which reports the horrendous industrial decline brought
about by green energy policies.

Hit hardest, of course, are the traditional
utilities. After all, the energy transition was designed to seal their
coffin. Once the proverbial investment for widows and orphans because
their revenue streams were considered rock-solid — these companies have
been nothing short of decimated. With 77 nuclear and fossil-fuel power
plants taken off the grid in recent years, Germany’s four big utilities —
E.ON, RWE, Vattenfall and EnBW — have had to write off a total of €46.2
billion since 2011.

RWE and E.ON alone have debt piles of €28.2 billion
and €25.8 billion, respectively, according to the latest company data.
Losses at Düsseldorf-based E.ON rose to €6.1 billion for the first three
quarters of 2015. Both companies have slashed the dividends on their
shares, which have lost up to 76 percent of their value. Regional
municipalities, which hold 24 percent of RWE’s shares, are scrambling to
plug the holes left in their budgets by the missing dividends.

Thousands of workers have already been let go,
disproportionately hitting communities in Germany‘s rust belt that are
already struggling with blight. RWE has cut 7,000 jobs since 2011. At
E.ON, the work force has shrunk by a third, a loss of over 25,000 jobs.
Just as banks spun off their toxic assets and unprofitable operations
into “bad banks” during the financial crisis, Germany’s utilities are
reorganizing to cut their losses.

Why are the Germans enacting such lunacy? Aren’t they supposed to be the sensible ones?

Well yes, up to a point. As a seasoned German-watcher explains to me,
it’s with good reason that one of Germany’s greatest contributions to
the world’s vocabulary is the word Angst.

The Germans are absolutely riddled with it – always have been – and it
explains the two otherwise inexplicable policies with which Germany is
currently destroying itself.

One, of course, is Energiewende caused by a misplaced, but deeply-held
neurosis about stuff like diminishing scarce resources and “global
warming” and the evils of Atomkraft (Nuclear power).

The other are its similarly insane immigration policies – the result of
the neurosis that if it doesn’t replace its declining population with a
supposedly healthy influx of immigrant workers, then it will wither and
cease to be the great force it was under people like Frederick the
Great, Bismarck and that chap in the 1930s and that no one will know or
care where Germany is any more.

Ironically, though, if national decline is what the Germans most fear
then the two policies they are pursuing to avoid it happening to be the
ones most likely to hasten it.

This is sad. Sad for Germany which, for all its faults, has produced
some pretty impressive things over the years: Beethoven; Kraftwerk;
Goethe; Porsche; autobahns; those two girls on Deutschland 83.

And even sadder for those of us who, through absolutely no fault of our
own happen to be shackled politically and economically to a socialistic
superstate called the European Union, most of whose rules are decided by
Germans over whom we have no democratic control.

Oh and by the way, Greenies: as I never tire of reminding you, you
insufferable tossers, not a single one of the “future generations” you
constantly cite in your mantras as justification for your disgusting,
immoral and anti-free-market environmental policies actually exists.

But the people you’re killing now as a result of those environmental policies DO exist.

Or rather they did, till you choked or froze them to death, you vile, evil, eco-Nazi scumbags.

If the green energy plans by the German Federal Government are
implemented, the expansion of onshore wind energy will soon come to a
standstill and then go into reverse.

According to figures by the Federal Network Agency, in the twelve months
from February 2015 to January 2016 new wind turbines with a net
capacity of nearly 3,600 megawatts were installed. The 3600 MW
correspond to about three nuclear reactors. […]

What is the future of wind energy in Germany?

This depends entirely on political developments. In early March, German
Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel presented a draft for the amendment of
the Renewable Energies Act (EEG). The new rules regulate the subsidy
levels for renewable energy. The new regulations are to be adopted in
coming months. The draft says, inter alia, that the amount of renewable
energy in the electricity mix will be limited to a level of 40 to 45
percent by 2025. At the end of last year the level was already nearly 33
percent.

What does this mean for the expansion of wind energy?

A study by consultants ERA on behalf of the Green Party’s parliamentary
group concludes that under these provisions the development of wind
energy will collapse fairly soon: A target of 45 percent would mean that
only 1500 megawatts could be installed annually after 2018, according
to the study. That’s less than half as the average of wind energy
installed in the past five days.

How does this affect the amount of electricity produced?

The 1500 MW of new-built wind turbines would be insufficient even to
replace older ones against new ones, the ERA-authors write. This means
that wind generation capacity is actually shrinking. “As a consequence,
there will be an economic stagnation of electricity from onshore wind
energy already in the 2020s”, the study claims. From 2022 onwards, the
amount of wind power will begin to shrink. With a 1,500 megawatts limit
the government would undermine its own goals of a so-called expansion
corridor of 2400-2600 megawatts.

What would the 40 percent cap mean?

A 40% cap for wind energy completely stop the construction of new wind
farms by of 2019, according to the ERA study. Overall, this would reduce
onshore wind power by almost 6000 megawatts compared to the end of 2015
– which would mean a massive slump in wind power generation by 18
terawatt hours.

What does this mean for companies that build the plants?

“The domestic market for many manufacturers collapses completely,” says
Julia Verlinden, spokesperson for Energy Policy in the Green Party’s
parliamentary group. “With their plan, the federal government is killing
the wind companies.” This although wind energy is a cost-effective
technology which can replace nuclear and coal power plants, she adds.

Who are the vested interests behind the government’s new plan?

Julia Verlinden claims that Energy Minister Gabriel seeks to protect
“old, fossil fuel power plants against green competition”. There is a
core of truth in this argument. It’s about power plants by the big
energy companies RWE, Eon, EnBW and Vattenfall. All four companies are
badly damaged, because they have relied too long on coal and nuclear
power. As a result, these sectors are now threatened by massive job
cuts. Trade unionists are putting pressure on to support these
companies. Moreover, the Quartet are to bear the costs for the
demolition of nuclear power plants and the disposal of nuclear waste.

What plans for the transformation of energy mean?

“With the planned EEG amendment Sigmar Gabriel wants to set himself a
monument as the wrecker of the green energy transition,” said Green
Party Vice Oliver Krischer. While the rest of the world is investing in
solar and wind power, Germany’s federal government is going into reverse
– just at a time when renewable energy has become so cheap.

Poland’s thriving wind energy industry has warned that it faces
bankruptcies, rapid divestment and an end to growth under a bill that
threatens executives with prison.

The wind power sector in Poland installed the largest amount of turbine
capacity in the EU last year after Germany, taking total industry
investment to €8bn. Turbines, including those owned by EDF, RWE and Eon,
produce about 13 per cent of the country’s electricity.

But proposals submitted to parliament by the ultraconservative rightwing
administration will tighten regulations to the point of killing off the
industry, critics have said.

"For some projects, it will be terminal?.?.?.?it will kill them," said
Wojciech Cetnarski, president of the Polish Wind Energy Association, an
industry lobby group. "This will result in bankruptcies. That is for
sure.

"No one will invest any more in this country’s wind energy industry if this law is passed."

The bill will make it illegal to build turbines within 2km of other
buildings or forests — a measure campaigners said would rule out 99 per
cent of land — and quadruple the rate of tax payable on existing
turbines — making most unprofitable.

Another clause in the bill would give authorities the power to shut down
each turbine for weeks at a time during monthly inspections, said
industry figures. Violations would result in hefty fines or two years’
imprisonment.

The oil makes up about 30% of mustard seeds and has long been
used for cooking in India. Americans will be pleased to know that
their wonderful bureaucracy has protected them from mustard oil by
banning its sale in America -- as a threat to their health. A
billion Indians can be wrong apparently

Last month, anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) activists engaged
in a war in the streets of India’s capital. The agitation is about the
genetically modified (GM) variant of mustard — DMH-11 (Dhara Mustard
Hybrid 11).

Why?

Proponents argue that it will increase crop yields by 25–30 percent
compared to the varieties grown in the country now, a move that could
help the country increase its edible oil production.

The opponents, though, put forward various arguments, a majority of
which are about the yield percentage and the impact of GM crops on the
health of the ecosystem, including on humans.

The DMH-11 variant was developed by The Centre for Genetic Manipulation
of Crop Plants (CGMCP) at Delhi University. It is directly regulated by
The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), which comes under
the Indian Government’s Environment Ministry. So it is an Indian
government project aimed at genetically modifying mustard to increase
yield, thereby directly addressing food security. The CGMCP was
scheduled to distribute the seeds for free, after the approval for
commercial cultivation from the government. It is at this juncture that
the anti-GMO advocates have caused the disruption.

Developing countries constitute 54 percent of the total global GM crop
area. Over the period of 18 years between 1996 and 2013, farm incomes
have increased by a cumulative $133.5 million due to the use of GM
crops. The direct global farm income benefit due to GM crops was $18.8
billion in 2012 and $20.5 billion in 2013.

Apart from improving the economic condition of farmers, the biotech
crops have also reduced the use of pesticides. The amount of reduction
in pesticide usage has been 550 million kg or 8.6 percent. Moreover, the
environmental footprint of biotech crops was reduced by 19 percent.

Let us for example consider Bt cotton — the only GM crop allowed for
commercial cultivation in India. The farm income benefit from that crop
was $16.2 million between 1996 and 2013.

When a developed nation like the U.S. can benefit $58.4 billion from
biotech crop-based farm income (1996 to 2013), why should poor countries
like India not adopt similar measures?

Economic Contribution: India’s Import of Oil from GM Crops

India imports 14 million tons (mt) of edible oil, 24 percent of which
comes predominantly from GM rapeseed oil and soybean oil. Surprisingly,
the anti-GMO advocates have not protested against GMO oil imports.
Rather they chose to protest against the genetic development and
implementation of mustard that contributes to 25 percent of India’s
edible oil production.

Even a meager conservative estimate of 10 percent increase in Mustard
production (actual projection of 20-30 percent increase in yield) will
help in reducing the import of GMO oil.

Safety of GM Mustard DMH-11

Anti-GMO activists have claimed that the GM variant is unsafe. But
DMH-11 went through Biosafety Research Level-1 (BRL-1) tests between
2011 and 2013, in Rajasthan, under the coordination of the National
Research Centre for Rapeseed-Mustard at Bharatpur, and BRL-2 tests at
the Indian Agriculture Research Institute in Delhi and the Punjab
Agricultural University in 2014-15.

It was deemed safe.

Yet the Anti-GMO campaigners had the single-minded objective of banning
the seed. It is quite amusing, given that the GM variant has not been
released for commercial farming, yet they have found “unsubstantiated”
reasons to call for a ban. After the recent protests, the government of
India ordered eight additional tests which will be included in the
seed’s biosafety dossier.

Thus the GM variant of mustard satisfies the important standards
regarding its use — productivity, economic contribution, and
environmental safety. Far too many voices have been raised against GMO
mustard without due consideration of the research behind its development
and the role it will play in edible oil production.

The Indian government is neither a proponent nor a villain of GMOs. But
it needs to be pro-active about food security. The government needs to
stand firm in its commitment to food security and the development of
scientific technology that will benefit millions. This should be
achieved without risking the quality of the environment and the
livelihood of many Indians.

My opinion is echoed by the Environment Minister of India, Prakash
Javadekar: “We cannot let our people starve. But if there are other good
alternatives available … our Prime Minister has repeatedly talked about
organic farming, and using biotechnology in agriculture. But at the
same time, scientific methods (GM) are also important.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

19 April, 2016

Pity the Warmists: "Powerfully Cold La Niña" Coming At Us Like An Express Train …Could Set A New Record!

Schneefan (snow fan) at German climate science critical site
wobleibtdieerderwaemung.de here presents the latest analysis of the
current ENSO, which shows a powerful La Niña in the works

Based on an array of data, Schneefan tells readers to expect a La Niña
already early in the second half of this year and that there are signs
it may turn into a Super La Nina – one that could persist until part way
into 2018.

The consequence, he writes: "With a delay of 4 to 5 months, global
temperatures will retreat over many years and fall below the long-term
climate mean."

From earlier ENSO models, the La Niña originally was not very evident,
but the NOAA has since drastically corrected its projections and the
CFSv2 is now anticipating "unusual cold sea surface temperatures in the
El Niño region of 3.4," the climate science critical site writes.

Schneefan reports that the latest models are now projecting "a
powerfully cold La Niña is on the way" – one that could smash the
earlier record set back by the La Niña of the 1970s.

The current CFSv2 projections are now pretty much in line with most of
the other ENSO models, and foresees already La Niña conditions with an
average of -0.9°K SSTA in August:

Schneefan also provides the numerical table from the NOAA showing past historical events since 1950:

The figures in the table, Schneefan writes, are actually the "falsified"
ones. The coldest La Niñas occurred in 1998-2001 (-1.6°K) and in 1973
(-1.9° K). The latest projections for the coming La Niña show these may
even be surpassed.

Also the energy content of the equatorial water mass down to 300 meters
below the surface dipped into negative territory by mid April, reaching
an anomaly of -0.7°K, thus already in the La Niña range.

The next chart is a poignant display of just how powerful the oncoming
La Niña is threatening to be. The chart shows the cross section of the
Pacific equatorial water down to 400 meters since January 2016:

The complex, coupled ocean/atmosphere index MEI (Multivariate ENSO
Index) also is pointing downward (see chart below) and will rapidly fall
below zero in the months ahead, just as was the case for the super
1997/98 El Niño, but this time it’ll be earlier, Schneefan tells us:

Schneefan also writes that the upcoming La Niña will also coincide with a
dying solar sunspot cycle, one that was a weak one to start with, and
the fact that the earth is now moving further away from the sun in its
orbit,. This will only make the cooling worse. He summarizes:

Thus so could the coming 2016/17 winter be as exciting as the 2010/11 winter: The Super La Nina and the Coming Winter.

Testimony before the Senate of Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels -- on 4.13.16

Transcript:

The energy industry is the industry that powers every other industry. To
the extent energy is affordable, plentiful, and reliable, human beings
thrive. To the extent energy is unaffordable, scarce, or unreliable,
human beings suffer.

And yet in this election year, the candidates, especially the Republican
candidates, have barely discussed energy. Thus, I am grateful for the
opportunity to discuss my moral evaluation of this administration’s
energy policies.

When we evaluate energy policies, such as President Obama’s efforts to
forcibly restrict fossil fuel use and mandate solar and wind energy, it
is always worth asking: Has this been tried before? And what happened
when it was?

The answer is: much, much milder versions of the President’s energy
policy have been tried in Europe—and resulted in skyrocketing energy
prices every time. Take Germany. Over the last decade, Germany pursued
the popular ideal of running on unreliable energy from solar and wind.
But since unreliable energy can’t be relied upon, it has to be propped
up by reliable energy--mostly fossil fuels--making the solar panels and
wind turbines an unnecessary and enormous cost to the system.

As a result, the average German pays 3-4 times more for electricity than
the average American. It’s so bad that Germans have had to add a new
term to the language: "energy poverty."

The United States should learn from the failed German experiment;
instead, our President is doubling down on it many times over. And, just
as ominously, he is leading global initiatives that call for even the
poorest countries to be forced to use unreliables instead of reliables.
This, in a world where 3 billion people have almost no access to energy
and over one billion people have no electricity. How could this possibly
be moral?

The alleged justification is that fossil fuels cause climate change and
should therefore be eliminated. But this does not follow. As with
anything in life, with fossil fuel’s impacts we need to look at the big
picture, carefully weighing both the benefits and the costs. And to do
that, we need to clearly define what we mean by "climate change."

Because while nearly everyone agrees that more CO2 in the atmosphere
causes some climate change, it makes all the difference in the world
whether that change is a mild, manageable warming or a runaway,
catastrophic warming.

Which is it? If we look at what has been scientifically demonstrated vs.
what has been speculated, the climate impact of CO2 is mild and
manageable. In the last 80 years, we have increased the amount of CO2 in
the atmosphere from .03% to .04%, and the warming has been barely more
than the natural warming that occurred in the 80 years before that, when
there were virtually no CO2 emissions.

From a geological perspective, both CO2 levels and temperatures are very
low; there is no perfect amount of CO2 or average temperature, although
higher CO2 levels do create more plant growth and higher temperatures
lower mortality rates.

To be sure, many prominent scientists and organizations predict
catastrophe--but this is wild speculation and nothing new. Indeed, many
of today’s thought leaders have been falsely predicting catastrophe for
decades. 30 years ago, NASA climate leader James Hansen predicted that
temperatures would rise by 2-4 degrees between 2000 and 2010; instead,
depending on which temperature data set you consult, they rose only
slightly or not at all.

30 years ago, President Obama’s top science advisor, John Holdren,
predicted that by now we’d be approaching a billion CO2-related deaths
from famine. Instead, famine has plummeted as have climate related
deaths across the board. According to data from the International
Disaster Database, deaths from climate-related causes such as extreme
heat, extreme cold, storms, drought, and floods have decreased at a rate
of 50%8 since the 1980s and 98% since major CO2 emissions began 80
years ago.

How is it possible that we’re safer than ever from climate? Because
while fossil fuel use has only a mild warming impact it has an enormous
protecting impact. Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we
make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we
need to make safe. And the driver behind sturdy buildings,
affordable heating and air-conditioning, drought relief, and everything
else that keeps us safe from climate is cheap, plentiful, reliable
energy, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.

Thus, the President’s anti-fossil fuel policies would ruin billions of
lives economically and environmentally--depriving people of energy and
therefore making them more vulnerable to nature’s ever-present climate
danger.

Policies that cause massive, unnecessary human suffering, including
increased climate vulnerability, are immoral. A moral energy policy is
one that liberates all the energy technologies, including fossil fuels,
nuclear, and large-scale hydro, and lets them compete to the utmost to
provide the most affordable, reliable energy for the most people. A
moral energy policy is an energy freedom policy.

A day after Bernie Sanders claimed he 'introduced the most comprehensive
climate change legislation' and said he would tax carbon use, the
Democratic presidential candidate chartered a Delta 767 to fly him to
Rome and back for less than 24 hours.

After attacking rival Hillary Clinton for her stance on fossil fuels
stepped on Thursday, Sanders stepped off the plane on Friday in Rome for
the Vatican conference with his wife, ten family members, a group of
campaign staff, Secret Service detail and members of the press.

The total group of what is believed to be below 50, flew in a chartered
Delta 767 for their trip, which can seat between 211 and 261 people,
depending on the model. It is unclear if Sanders' aircraft had flatbed
seats.

Sanders' wife, who is Catholic and ten of Sanders' other family members
joined him for the 8,870 round-trip flight, including four of his
grandchildren.

The group of campaign staff that flew with Sanders is believed to be small, as is the group of reporters.

A press officer from the Secret Service told Daily Mail Online that he
could not disclose the number of Secret Service members who were with
the presidential candidate.

With a range of 6,408 miles on a full tank of gas, it can be calculated
that a 767 like Sanders' flying 4,435 miles from New York to Rome uses
approximately 16,596 gallons of fuel. The round-trip flight will use
approximately 33,193 gallons.

On average, an American flies only 7,500 miles per year, according to
AmericanForests.org, 1,360 fewer miles than Sanders' round-trip Rome
travel. Thus, an average American releases less carbon emissions via
aircraft each year than Sanders did in 24 hours.

In comparison to vehicles, an average American drives approximately
13,476 miles per year, according to the Department of Transportation,
4,606 miles more than Sanders' Friday air travel.

It would take the average American between seven and eight months to drive as far as Sanders traveled.

The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the flight is unknown.

An average round trip flight from New York to Europe can produce two to
three tons of carbon dioxide per person, according to the New York
Times.

An average person in the United States normally generates approximately
19 tons of carbon dioxide per year through driving, transportation and
disposing of waste.

It is unknown how much it cost Sanders to charter the plane for the
one-day trip, but according to a 2012 article from the Wall Street
Journal, many sports teams charter similar aircraft and pay as much as
$200,000 for one-way domestic flights.

How corrupt and fraudulent is the government "science" that denies natural climate change?

Paul Driessen and Ron Arnold

A self-appointed coalition of Democrat state attorneys general is
pursuing civil or criminal racketeering actions against ExxonMobil, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute and other organizations. The AGs claim
the groups are committing fraud, by "denying" climate change. The charge
is bogus.

What we contest are false assertions that "humans are creating a
dangerous climate change crisis." We do not accept false claims that
"the science is settled" and will not be limited to discussing only
"what we must do now to avert looming climate catastrophes."

That’s not just constitutionally protected free speech. It is the foundation of scientific progress and informed public policy.

Meanwhile, EPA and other federal agencies, the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate activist organizations, state
legal and environmental agencies, and legions of scientists who receive
government grants for advancing the "manmade climate cataclysm" mantra
are themselves engaging in what many say is truly misleading or
fraudulent climate science, policy and regulation.

Millions in poor countries die annually from preventable diseases,
because hysterical climate claims justify denying them access to
affordable modern electricity and transportation that could be provided
by coal, natural gas and petroleum products. In developed nations,
climate hysteria has cost millions of jobs, adversely affecting people’s
living standards, health and welfare. In European countries, thousands
are dying each winter, because they can no longer afford proper heat.

The problem is not human intervention in the climate; it’s improper
political intervention in climate science. It has corrupted scientific
findings from the very beginning.

A 1995 document from the US State Department to the IPCC confirms this,
or at least gives allegations of fraud and corruption sufficient
credence to raise serious integrity questions.

When a recent FOIA lawsuit sought that 1995 document, the State
Department said there is "no such correspondence in our files." But if
we have a copy of the document, how come State doesn’t? Attesting to its
bona fides, Our copy has State’s date-stamp, a Department official’s
signature – and 30 pages of detailed instructions on how the Clinton
Administration wanted the IPCC to change its scientific findings and
summary for policymakers, to reflect US climate and energy policy
agendas.

The document is too complex and technical to summarize. So we’ve posted
it in PDF form – unchanged in any way and exactly as received from a
well known and credible source who must remain anonymous to avoid
retribution by people like the RICO prosecutors. You’ll be amazed at
what it says.

It consists of a three-page cover letter to Sir John Houghton, head of
the IPCC Science Working Group, from Day Mount, Acting State Department
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Development, introducing
30 pages of line-by-line "suggestions" from scientist Robert Watson and
others. One wanted a correct statement about warming rates changed to a
flat lie. "Change ‘continue to rise’ to ‘rise by even greater amounts’
to provide a sense of magnitude of the extended change," it says.

Talk about agendas dictating science. Moreover, this "ominous" warming
ended just a couple years later, there has been virtually no planetary
warming since then, and the warming followed 30 years of cooling.

The document raises serious questions about State Department actions on
subsequent IPCC Assessment Reports. What did State do? Where are the
correspondence and instructions to change the science in other IPCC
reports? What are the State Department, EPA and other Obama agencies
doing now to further corrupt climate science and advance their radical
energy, social, economic and political agendas?

We know they won’t answer truthfully. If they did, they’d have to
investigate themselves under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations (RICO) Act. Worse, the corruption, deception,
manipulation, exaggeration and fabrication have grown with every passing
year, as alarmists sought to obfuscate their shenanigans and preserve
their $1.5 trillion Climate Crisis Empire. The AG actions are designed
to punish and silence organizations that are revealing the scientific
flaws and deceptions.

The IPCC was set up in 1988 to examine possible human influences on
Earth’s climate, amid powerful natural forces that have always driven
the complex, dynamic, turbulent, frequently changing climate. As we note
in our book, Cracking Big Green, from the outset, Swedish meteorology
professor and zealous warming advocate Bert Bolin wanted to help
scientists "get global warming onto the political agenda."

By 1995, Bolin could finally say "the balance of evidence suggests a
discernible human influence on global climate." Of course, "discernible"
merely means "detectable." But it gave the State Department license to
dictate the "science." Then "discernible" morphed into "dominant," which
morphed into "sole." Suddenly humans had replaced the complex,
interrelated natural forces that had driven innumerable climate changes
throughout Earth’s history. Voila. Climate hysteria began to drive the
political agenda.

Behind the hysteria are carefully orchestrated efforts to find steadily
increasing planetary temperatures, and claim floods, droughts,
hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms and snowless winters are more frequent
and intense – even though Real World records show they are not.
Original data are "homogenized" with other data to create higher
temperatures; student papers and activist news releases are presented as
"peer-reviewed studies" in IPCC documents; computer models are
presented as "proof" of chaos, even though actual observations
contradict their predictions; and ClimateGate emails reveal more
chicanery. As climatologist and professor David Legates explains, even
the 97% consensus claims are fraudulent.

Organizations that pointed out these flaws and fabrications became a
threat to politicians, activists, "warmist" scientists and bureaucrats
who were determined to advance an anti-fossil-fuel agenda. Their money
and efforts were not winning the non-debate. They needed a blitzkrieg
counterattack.

In June 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate
Accountability Institute organized a "workshop" in La Jolla, CA for
climate activists, scientists, lawyers and other experts. Their
subsequent report detailed how successful attacks on tobacco companies
could be used as a template for campaigns, RICO actions and other
operations against "climate denier" companies and organizations.

By 2015, Senator Sheldon "Torquemada" Whitehouse (D-RI) was calling for
RICO prosecutions. His actions prompted free market champion Alex
Epstein to tell a congressional committee the senator should resign
because of his "unconstitutional" attacks on free speech and the energy
that powers our economy.

In January 2016, a secret meeting was held in the Rockefeller Family
Fund’s Manhattan offices. It brought 350.org founder Bill McKibben and a
dozen other anti-hydrocarbon activists together, to refine their legal
strategies against ExxonMobil and others who dared to challenge "the
scientific consensus" that fossil fuels have brought humanity and our
planet to the brink of "climate chaos."

Then, on March 29, 2016, New York AG Eric Schneiderman headlined a press
conference of 16 state attorneys general, who announced their intention
to go after organizations that were "committing fraud" by "knowingly
deceiving" the public about the threat of manmade climate change. Within
days, he had launched a RICO action against ExxonMobil, and the Virgin
Islands had done likewise against CEI.

It is difficult not to perceive a pattern of collusion here, among the
activists and their financiers, among the AGs, and probably among all of
them. We are eager to see what emails and other documents might reveal –
especially since Section 241 of US Code Title 18 makes it a felony "for
two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten or
intimidate" another person in exercising their constitutional rights.

We have only begun to fight – for energy, jobs, sound science, free
speech and human rights. CEI and Exxon are vigorously battling the
outrageous RICO suits, and CFACT will present its new Climate Hustle
movie in a one-day May 2 extravaganza in hundreds of theaters across the
USA. We will not be silenced.

Via email

Australia: Marxist paper says that barrier reef damage is being covered up by Murdoch newspaper

The main Murdoch paper in North Queensland, where the reef is, did
cover the bleaching. It was just the main Murdoch paper in the
South, where the reef is not, that mostly ignored the alarms.

And
the "Courier Mail" had good reason to ignore the Greenie shrieks.
Greenies have been crying "wolf" over bleaching almost incessantly for
many years. Another such cry is not much news.

And
the point is that corals always recover. On Bikini atoll the
corals re-grew even after sustaining a direct hit from a thermo-nuclear
blast. And even the chief reef alarmist said: I’d expect most of
the corals from Cairns southwards to recover"

Coral bleaching is a complex event and it is only Warmists who are sure that global warming causes it. As NOAA says: "Coral bleaching is not well understood by scientists. Many different hypotheses exist as to the cause behind coral bleaching"

I
grew up a short boat ride from the reef and as far back as I can
remember (over 60 years) there have been alarms about damage to the
reef, including bleaching. And that was long before global warming is
supposed to have got going.

Assuming that warmer water is
the problem, however, note one thing: Both the big 1998 die-back
and the present die-back coincided with big El Nino events. And
Australia is right in the path of an El Nino event. It's by far
the most parsimonious hypothesis to say that the present problems of the
reef are wholly an El Nino effect, and hence just another one of
nature's cycles, nothing to do with global warming

But most of the people quoted below are well-known Warmists so they are too predictable to be heeded

The images went around the world. The snapshots of the Great Barrier
Reef, from Cairns to Torres Strait, looked more like a pile of bones
than coral. Professor Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research
Council’s centre of excellence for coral reef studies at James Cook
University in Townsville, was surveying the reef by plane and
helicopter. It was, he wrote on March 26, "the saddest trip of my life".

From March 22, Hughes criss-crossed 520 individual reefs in four days,
covering 3200 kilometres by air. Just four showed no evidence of
bleaching. The further north Hughes travelled, over what were once the
most pristine waters of the reef, unspoiled by the runoff that pollutes
the south, the worse the bleaching became. Fringing reefs in Torres
Strait, he said, were "completely white".

The Australian Institute of Marine Science currently has 300 researchers
swarming over the reef, complementing the aerial surveys. Reefs are
scored on a scale of zero, which indicates no bleaching, to four, which
means more than 60 per cent is bleached. Their observations have
replicated Hughes’s. In the meantime, Hughes has continued southwards,
trying to find a limit to the unfolding tragedy beneath him.

Like most scientists, Hughes prefers to talk in numbers. "I wouldn’t
talk about the Barrier Reef dying or the killing of the reef or
whatever. I think that’s overstating it," he says. "I’ll say what number
of reefs we’ve surveyed, how many are severely bleached and how many
are not severely bleached – but then often the language gets changed,
depending on the style of reporting by particular outlets."

To clarify, bleached coral is not dead coral. It’s just very unhealthy.
Varying combinations of heat stress, bright sunlight and poor water
quality cause coral to expel the algae, or zooxanthellae, on which it
feeds, and which also gives it its brilliant colour. This exposes the
limestone skeleton beneath. Different types of coral are more
susceptible to bleaching than others.

Hughes is clear, though: this is really, really serious. "There’s a
window of opportunity to survey the corals when they’re severely
bleached, because after a few weeks they start to die, and then the
skeletons get covered in seaweed and you can’t see them from the air
anymore," he says. "We timed our northern surveys to coincide with the
peak whiteness of the reefs, before there was significant mortality."

North of Cooktown, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is now
reporting up to 50 per cent mortality rates. The full extent of the
damage, Hughes says, will take months to unfold. "Different corals
linger for longer before they die – and also, of course, some of them
won’t die, they will recover. I’d expect most of the corals from Cairns
southwards to recover."

When Hughes returned from his first sojourn north, his phone rang off
the hook. In the week before April 7, according to the media monitoring
company Meltwater, the story was reported more than 1000 times in 70
countries. Video footage given to ABC TV’s 7.30 and later used by the
World Wildlife Fund has been viewed more than four million times. "It’s
fair to say it’s getting more coverage outside Australia than inside,"
Hughes says.

By any objective measure, the bleaching of the reef is a massive story.
It’s one of the seven natural wonders of the world – the only Australian
environmental feature to be granted such status. It’s home to about 215
species of birds, 30 types of whales or dolphins, half a dozen kinds of
sea turtle, and 10 per cent of the entire world’s species of fish.

Any potential danger to the reef is economic and diplomatic as much as
environmental. According to a Deloitte study commissioned by the
Australian government in 2013, its value to the national economy is
about $5.7 billion annually. It attracts two million international
visitors each year. It employs close to 70,000 people on a full-time
basis.

There have been some efforts to inform people about the devastation
under way on the reef in the media. News Corp’s The Cairns Post – with a
local readership whose livelihoods are directly threatened – has
reported the issue, as has Fairfax’s Brisbane Times. But in Queensland’s
only statewide newspaper you wouldn’t have read about Hughes’s findings
or their ramifications. Since his surveys began, The Courier-Mail
hasn’t interviewed him, nor sent one of its journalists into the field
to verify either his or his colleagues’ observations.

"It basically shows they’re either in denial about the science," says
Ian Lowe, emeritus professor in the School of Science at Griffith
University, "or they’re colluding in obscuring the science so the
community don’t understand the threats being posed to the reef, both by
climate change and by the associated acidification of the oceans, both
of which put real pressure on corals."

On March 25, the day Hughes completed his survey of the northern section
of the reef, the newspaper ran a short piece on page three, lambasting
Greenpeace for sharing an image of bleached coral taken in American
Samoa that was incorrectly labelled as being from the Barrier Reef.

Last week, on April 7, The Courier-Mail ran on its front page a story
titled "David Attenborough’s verdict: Still the most magical place on
Earth", accompanied by a picture of the famed naturalist and filmmaker
standing atop some coral at low tide. Inside was a double-page spread
headlined "It takes your breath away", with the sub-head "Reports of
reef’s death greatly exaggerated: Attenborough".

Well, at least that was what the subeditor said. The lead quote came not
from Attenborough, but from federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt,
after he was granted a preview of the first part of Attenborough’s TV
series on the reef that aired last Sunday. "The key point that I had
from seeing the first of the three parts is that clearly, the world’s
Great Barrier Reef is still the world’s Great Barrier Reef," Hunt said.

Had Hunt seen the third part, or had the reader progressed to the end of
the article, they would have noted Attenborough’s conclusion: "The
Great Barrier Reef is in grave danger. The twin perils brought by
climate change – an increase in the ocean temperature and in its acidity
– threaten its very existence. If they continue to rise at the present
rate, the reefs will be gone within decades."

The Courier-Mail’s relationship with environment organisations has been
frosty since the departure of long-serving reporter Brian Williams.
Williams says these issues have always waxed and waned. "Not long before
I left The Courier-Mail I was doing stories on the prospect of this
bleaching occurring, and I actually spoke to some friends in the
conservation movement and suggested that the debate would swing back
again."

For now, though, the newspaper is running heavily in support of Adani’s
massive Carmichael coalmine in the Galilee Basin, which had been given
the go-ahead by the Queensland state government on April 3. "In the real
world you need jobs," began an editorial on the same day, which
lambasted "hashtag activism" and defended the regulations it claimed
would protect the reef.

"The science on the health of the reef is plain," the paper said. "This
great natural wonder loved by all Queenslanders faces a range of
stresses – as it has during the entire past century – from agricultural
runoff to the current coral bleaching."

No mention was made of climate change. The science on that is plain,
too: according to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority,
bleaching is caused primarily by heat stress. The authority also notes
that the reef has in fact been bleached only twice previously in the
past century – and those events were in 1998 and 2002. This event is far
worse. Hughes has said the reef is being "fried". It’s perhaps more
accurate to say it’s being slowly boiled. Water temperatures are up to
35 degrees around Lizard Island, and about 2 degrees above normal summer
averages generally.

Climate scientists say that in addition to 2015 being the hottest year
since records began in 1880, water temperatures around Australia are at
all-time highs. They point to more frequent El Niño events, and more
intense cyclones. It’s not just the Barrier Reef that is suffering,
either: corals are being bleached across the southern hemisphere, from
the central and eastern Pacific across to the Caribbean.

Scientists usually fare poorly in the media for their struggle to speak
in lay terms. Now, the government’s own experts are being dismissed as
activists.

John Cook, a climate communication fellow for the Global Change
Institute at the University of Queensland, says it’s a deliberate
strategy. "It’s an attempt by people who oppose climate action to
deliberately lump them together, and so when a scientist publishes
empirical research about climate change, then they get labelled an
activist." Politicising science, he says, is a way of casting doubt on
it.

"I remember having conversations with editors about how climate should
be covered, and being told that it was a political story," remembers
Graham Readfearn, who launched his GreenBlog at The Courier-Mail in
2008, before resigning in 2010. "The politics are a distraction when the
issue is quite literally staring you in the face, in the form of white
coral."

The newspaper’s website has since deleted all of Readfearn’s posts.
Questions to The Courier-Mail’s editor, Lachlan Heywood, went
unanswered.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a professor of marine science at the University of
Queensland with a special interest in the communication of science
issues, notes that the premiere of Attenborough’s series on Sunday night
was watched by 10.6 million people in Britain alone. But in Queensland,
there is an eerie silence. In politics and in the state’s most-read
newspaper, no one wants to talk about what is happening in front of
them.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

18 April, 2016

NASA lies and tergiversations

All the things denied by NASA below have been documented many times
-- including on this blog. Amusing, though, when they said "There
is far too much focus on surface temperatures". I wonder why they
said that? It wouldn't be because they haven't been rising, would
it? And what shows warming if global temperatures don't?

In many online forums involving climate change science, the discussions
are frequently hijacked by doubters making the same tired,
debunked arguments. On Tuesday, NASA was having none of it.

When doubters began polluting a thread started by Bill Nye "The Science
Guy" about his rejected attempt to place a bet about global warming, the
Facebook account "NASA Climate Change" decided to pounce.

NASA Climate Change also took on the doubter talking point that because
global warming is happening on other planets, what’s happening on Earth
isn’t anything special. "Other planets in the solar system are not
warming," it countered. "There is a small amount of evidence of seasonal
changes in parts of the solar system, but there is no evidence of
global warming anywhere — except on Earth."

When it was accused of "fudging numbers" in producing global warming
data, it retorted: "NASA does not ‘fudge’ numbers. All data requires
statistical adjustments to remove bias." NASA Climate Change then
directed commenters to multiple independent analyses of temperature data
which show global warming while reminding readers: "There is far too
much focus on surface temperatures. They are but one measure of warming.
All other measures . . . continue unabated."

How CNN covered the DC Premiere of the "Climate Hustle" film -- below:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin mocked Bill Nye on Thursday, using the
premier of a film that criticizes climate change scientists to call into
question Nye's credentials.

"Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am," the 2008 Republican vice
presidential nominee said, according to The Hill. "He's a kids' show
actor, he's not a scientist."

Palin, who was speaking at the Washington premiere of the anti-climate
change film "Climate Hustle," targeted Nye during a rant against the
"alarmism" of climate change activists.

Scientists who study climate have an overwhelmingly consensus that the
Earth is warming and humans are the cause, according to multiple
peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Palin urged parents to teach their children to "ask those questions and
not just believe what Bill Nye the Science Guy is trying to tell them"
about climate change.

In "Climate Hustle," a clip of an interview with Nye is shown in which
he seems to advocate investigating people who are responsible "for the
introduction of this extreme doubt...about climate change."

"I can see where people are very concerned about this and are pursuing
criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions line this,"
he says in the clip.

Nye, who attended the White House Science Fair this week, is a vocal
supporter of addressing climate change, and graduated from Cornell
University's School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering.

But he is probably best known for his role in the popular educational TV
series "Bill Nye the Science Guy," which covered a variety of science
topics for grade-school children.

British bird charity has fallen into the hands of incompetent Greenie madmen

Theory put before reality and class hatred make a toxic
combination. A mainly upper class sport in Britain is grouse
hunting so to spike those loathed "toffs" the RSPB want to "protect"
grouse, mainly by killing them!

By Sir Ian Botham

Soaring high above my home county of Yorkshire is a very special bird.
The extraordinary eagle owl with its 6ft wingspan is back in Britain a
few thousand years after human pressure forced them from these shores.

What's not to like about these beautiful birds breeding once more in the
wilds of Northern England? Especially when their scientific name is
'bubo bubo'?

The reported loss of England's last golden eagle means the eagle owl is
now the country's biggest winged hunter – an 'apex predator' to be proud
of.

Yet it has a most unlikely enemy, and it comes in the shape of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

No one is quite sure how our bubo bubos made their return, whether they
escaped from private aviaries or made their own way from abroad. Either
way, you would think that the charity would be delighted to see such a
magnificent native bird back on home territory.

Far from it. Last month I read that the RSPB is not only hostile towards
our new eagle owls, it wants to 'nip the colonisation in the bud'. The
RSPB has been arguing for the removal of eagle owls before they become
re-established.

This hostility is shared by a wider group of RSPB supporters and bird
enthusiasts. On its website, the RSPB admits that eagle owls have been
'demonised' by some bird-lovers. Worse still, some people seem to be
deliberately disturbing the birds' nests to stop them breeding.

In the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, eagle owls abandoned their nests
last year due to human 'visitors'. This spring, local eagle owl fans in
the region have set up a watch on a nest because, they say, they fear
that RSPB officials might disturb it.

So why is the RSPB hindering – if not actually harassing – the eagle owl? It comes down to that organisation's continuing battle with grouse moors and their owners.

The RSPB is rightly determined to protect the beautiful hen harrier,
which feeds off grouse – but at the expense, it seems, of the eagle owl
because, aside from rabbits, it occasionally attacks hen harriers!

For the RSPB this is a particular problem because hen harriers are a
useful weapon. If there were enough hen harriers, they would force the grouse shoots out of business.

In this proxy battle, it is the eagle owl that is the victim.

Fortunately the bubo bubo has a friend in the shape of wildlife
commentator George Monbiot, who wants them actively reintroduced in
Britain as part of his vision of rewilding the countryside with top
predators, such as the lynx or wolves.

Now these animals might make country walks with the kids a little hairy,
but I am well up for George's plan to have more eagle owls.

Nature needs a balance. When we have too many medium-size birds of prey
they will not just wipe out smaller species but also then face
starvation because of lack of prey.

Top predators, such as eagle owls, can help keep smaller bird of prey
numbers balanced just as lynx, if we had them here in Britain, could
help control deer numbers. Since we don't, we have RSPB marksmen
shooting excess deer to stop them overgrazing on its land.

Yet when it comes to the conservation of birds, the RSPB's leaders
favour a few photogenic species at the expense of balance. This is not
for ecological reasons but the result of fundraising targets and ideological prejudice.

The RSPB, for example, believes that all grouse moors are bad. Very bad.
Earlier this year, the RSPB's vice-president, Chris Packham, even
described grouse moors as an 'evil community'.

This is the same Chris Packham who is known to millions as a presenter
on shows including Springwatch. This raises the question of how the BBC
can pretend that he is an impartial TV presenter on matters such as
this.

An internal BBC report has already found that the Corporation's nature reporting is over-reliant on the RSPB.

The sort of extraordinary language used by Packham does little to help
build relationships between the RSPB and those who own or manage many of
the UK's most successful bird habitats. For what it's worth, I am
absolutely convinced that the grouse on my plate has had a far better
life than the chicken on yours. Grouse live entirely in the wild and
typically do so for a year or two before being shot.

A so-called 'free range' chicken is probably crowded into a barn with
around 12 other chickens per square metre and lives just six weeks
before being slaughtered – a point recently highlighted in The Mail on
Sunday.

It is true, of course, that the RSPB contains many sincere people who
bring deep experience and work well with neighbouring farmers and
gamekeepers. They avoid the doctrine of their top brass and recognise
that endangered curlews, for example, are thriving on grouse moors.

So are lapwings and golden plovers. Privately employed gamekeepers excel
at protecting these ground-nesting birds from predators such as foxes
and stoats.

It is a different story on land owned by the RSPB, however. RSPB
doctrine means that its wardens are not allowed to be as tough on
predators, and so their results fall short.

The RSPB's failure to look after hen harriers is particularly telling.
Last September, The Mail on Sunday pointed out that, despite the RSPB
having been in charge of seven of England's 12 hen harrier nests in
2015, it managed to successfully protect just one of the 18 chicks that
fledged.

Was this the result of too many visitors near the nests? Were the
parents scared by tagging attempts? Was it a hungry bubo bubo? Or was
it, as the RSPB management implied, the fault of gamekeepers?

That doesn't wash with me. There hasn't been a single prosecution of a
gamekeeper for persecuting hen harriers in England for 15 years. They
have been putting their house in order.

I have zero tolerance for illegal shooting of hen harriers; attitudes in
the game sector have been improving and I hope that will continue.

The same can barely be said of the RSPB, although recent months have
seen signs of change. The leadership has only just started to realise
how many organisations now see it not as the august body it ought to be,
but as the blinkered bully of the conservation world.

For decades the organisation – which pulls in £133 million a year – has
been in the hands of Left-wing Greens. Now it has so overtaxed the
goodwill of our nation that its management's had no alternative but to
learn the art of compromise. Climbdown number one was over hen harriers.
For years the RSPB had been blocking a Government scheme to help this
bird recover by raising chicks in aviaries. With evidence of the
charity's own conservation failures mounting, the RSPB has offered a
welcome to the initiative – through gritted teeth.

The second climbdown this year involved a widow's gift to the charity of
20 acres of farmland in the Cheshire village of Somerford. The RSPB,
with its inexhaustible appetite for cash, had decided to ignore the
widow's request that the land should not be built on and instead planned
to take a £6 million profit by handing it over to developers.

The RSPB had to change tack after the case was highlighted in the press.
Now, to the delight of villagers, 12 of the acres will instead be
turned into a nature garden with an orchard and pond.

It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the RSPB has been used
to getting its way. It has a lot of weight to throw around.

This bloated organisation has become so adept at milking public and
private purses it now has as many staff, about 2,000, as the
Government's conservation agency, Natural England. Many academics and
officials have been intimidated by it.

Next month the elite scientific body, the Royal Society, will publish a
scathing critique of the way the RSPB has been distorting science to
suit its own political agenda against grouse moors.

In their article, a dozen of the world's top ecologists will say that
RSPB press releases displayed 'only passing resemblance to the key
findings' of scientific research.

So, in the space of a few months, the RSPB has got itself on the wrong
side of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra)
over its objection to the Government's hen harrier recovery scheme and
some of the world's top ecologists.

These reverses followed earlier rebukes from the Charity Commission and
the Advertising Standards Authority for misleading donors. Donors had
been told by the RSPB that it was spending 90p from every donated £1 on
conservation. The regulators found the reality to be nearer 30p.

The other 70p had been swallowed by the RSPB's huge expenditure on
fundraising, campaigning, and its catastrophic pension fund deficit.
This deficit is now an eye-watering £86 million as the RSPB failed to
match the contributions of its fast-growing staff with sufficient
pension contributions of its own.

It means that of the £7 million of private donations the RSPB received
last year, £4 million went straight out of the door to bail out the
pension scheme.

Not that the waste ends there. Millions more are spent on lawyers as the
RSPB tries to get involved in politics and bludgeons the Government
with judicial reviews.

Even the RSPCA – that other activist-led charity with a penchant for putting politics before animal welfare – is better run.

I take particular issue with the RSPB's deeply flawed claim that the biggest threat of all to birds is climate change.

A rather basic problem with this thesis was revealed last month when
RSPB research showed that British birds were thriving – because of
climate change.

Despite that, the RSPB has gone ahead with the futile gesture of
building its own wind turbine at its Bedfordshire HQ. Who knows how many
birds will fall victim to its blades.

I won't be surprised if every morning the first duty of the RSPB press office will be to bury the feathered corpses.

I am encouraged that my You Forgot The Birds campaign – which I wrote
about first in The Mail on Sunday 18 months ago – has helped start a
process of change within the RSPB.

I hope that, after the climbdowns discussed above, it will do more to
protect vulnerable eagle owl nests from visitors and predators, and –
just as vitally – that it will take quick action when eggs are
abandoned.

Yet I don't think that substantial change will come until the Charity
Commission stops sitting on the fence and instead transforms itself into
a bubo bubo and swoops down on the RSPB's inept trustees.

In sport, in politics and in business repeated failure means that you
get the chop to allow better people to take the opportunities. The RSPB
is one charity which would be improved by a cull.

It’s something climate skeptics have long suspected: Government
involvement in science has skewed data to reflect the government’s
agenda.

"Many have suspected that U.S. political intervention in climate science
has corrupted the outcome," notes Ron Arnold in an essay posted on
CFact.org. "The new emergence of an old 1995 document from the U.S.
State Department to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change confirms those suspicions, or at least gives the
allegation credence enough to ask questions."

Though a FOIA request for the 1995 document came up empty ("No such
correspondence in our files"), the pdf is available online. The 30-page
document, entitled "U.S. Government Specific Comments on the Draft IPCC
WG I Summary for Policymakers," gives detailed instructions on "how to
change the IPCC’s science document and the summary for policymakers."

"The document itself consists of a three-page cover letter to Sir John
Houghton, head of IPCC Working Group I (Science), from Day Mount, Deputy
Assistant Secretary, Acting, Environment and Development, United States
Department of State, along with the thirty-page instruction set with
line-by-line ‘suggestions,’ written by scientist Robert Watson and
others," writes Arnold.

He also notes, "Among the more revealing tidbits is a remark scolding a
scientist for being honest about the weakness of aerosol forcing data:
‘We clearly cannot use aerosol forcing as the trigger of our smoking
gun, and then make a generalized appeal to uncertainty to exclude these
effects from the forward-looking modeling analysis.’ One instruction was
to change a correct statement about warming rates into a flat lie:
‘Change "continue to rise" to "rise by even greater amounts" to provide a
sense of magnitude of the extended change.'"

This verbal manipulation as far back as 1995 illustrates how government
involvement in climate science is skewing the outcome to reflect an
agenda.

NASA is noted to have altered its own temperature data by 0.5C since
2001. "NASA temperature data doesn’t even agree with NASA temperature
data from 15 years ago," notes the article "Global temperature record is
a smoking gun of collusion and fraud."

The article also chronicles similar manipulation by the Japan
Meteorological Agency; and that much of the Southern Hemisphere data is
"mostly made up."

"The claimed agreement in temperature data is simply not legitimate," it
notes. "The people involved know that their data is inadequate,
tampered and largely made up. They all use basically the same GHCN data
set from NOAA (which has lost more than 80 percent of their stations
over the past few decades) and E-mails show that they discussed with
each other ways to alter the data to make it agree with their theory."

WND has reported extensively on global warming, including a few months
back when, despite no rise in average global temperature for nearly two
decades, some two-dozen scientists with major U.S. universities urged
President Obama to use RICO laws to prosecute opponents who deny mankind
is causing catastrophic changes in the climate.

That’s the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which can put people in jail.

The scientists said their critics’ methods "are quite similar to those
used earlier by the tobacco industry," which was the target of a RICO
investigation that "played an important role in stopping the tobacco
industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the
dangers of smoking."

Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said
global temperatures have been dropping since the turn of the century,
prompting the change in terminology from "global warming" to "climate
change."

Activists are also spending less time discussing temperatures and more
time pointing to more extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold
snaps and heat waves. Ball said there’s a shred of truth there, but it’s
being badly distorted.

Marc Morano is executive editor and chief correspondent for
ClimateDepot, as well as host and producer of the upcoming film "Climate
Hustle." In an interview with WND, he said, "These documents further
reveal how the grand narrative of man-made global warming has been
crafted and forged into a partisan like campaign cause. The U.N. reports
were altered as needed to promote the ideological and political goals
of the establishment pushing climate fears.

"Any talking points that did not fit their narrative were cast aside and
any expression of uncertainty quashed," he added. "The ‘global warming’
movement is a pure lobbying movement on some levels. These old
documents echo the 2009 Climategate scandal where the upper echelon of
the U.N. scientists were exposed colluding on now to craft a narrative
and mold the science to persuade the public, media and policy makers of
the urgency of ‘acting’ on ‘global warming.'"

Manipulation of public emotion through various strategies influences
public policy in massive ways, which makes the 1995 document noteworthy
for how far back this goes.

"The 1995 document raises 2016 questions about the State Department’s
actions in the subsequent United National IPCC Assessment Reports,"
notes Arnold. "What did they do? Where are the correspondence and
instructions to change the science in all the IPCC Assessments? What is
the Obama State Department doing to corrupt climate science to its
forward its radical social and political agenda? Some of that is
obvious. It’s the clandestine part we need to know."

Climate change is a "global crisis," and addressing it will bring
"economic disloation," including job losses, Sen. Bernie Sanders said at
Thursday's CNN-hosted Democrat debate in Brooklyn.

"Pope Francis reminded us that we are on a suicide course," Sanders
said. "Our legislation understands, ...that there will be economic
dislocation. It is absolutely true. There will be some people who lose
their job. And we build into our legislation an enormous amount of money
to protect those workers. It is not their fault that fossil fuels are
destroying our climate.

"But we have got to stand up and say right now, as we would if we were
attacked by some military force, we have got to move...urgently and
boldly."

Sanders has called for a nationwide ban on fracking, a phase-out of all
nuclear power in the U.S., and a carbon tax. "We have got to tell the
fossil fuel industry that their short-term profits are not more
important than the future of this planet," he said.

Sanders also has introduced legislation calling for 10 million "solar
rooftops," as he described them. "We can put probably millions of people
to work retrofitting and weatherizing buildings all over this country
-- saving -- rebuilding our rail system, our mass transit system.

Clinton told the gathering that she's set "big goals" for addressing climate change.

"I want to see us deploy a half a billion more solar panels by the end
of my first term and enough clean energy to provide electricity to every
home in America within 10 years.

"So I have big, bold goals, but I know in order to get from where we
are, where the world is still burning way too much coal, where the world
is still too intimidated by countries and providers like Russia, we
have got to make a very firm but decisive move in the direction of clean
energy."

Clinton said she would build on what President Obama has accomplished --
"building on the clean power plan, which is currently under attack by
fossil fuels and the right in the Supreme Court, which is one of the
reasons why we need to get the Supreme Court justice that President
Obama has nominated to be confirmed so that we can actually continue to
make progress."

She noted that Sanders has not been able to pass his legislation:
"And my approach I think is going to get us there faster without tying
us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support
what you are proposing," she told the senator.

This happens during unusually warm periods, such as during El Niño
years, but doesn’t always kill coral, which can recover when waters cool
again.

Corals are often able to survive heatwaves by developing resistance
during periods of milder warming, when water temperatures rise and cool
off again, says Tracy Ainsworth of the Australian Research Council
Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. The corals are essentially
given a warning for what’s about to come, a sort of practice run.

A little stress can help corals

"Corals that undergo smaller stress prior to a bleaching event are able
to retain more symbionts within the tissue, those algae which are
crucial for nutrition," says Ainsworth. "This has major implications as
to whether or not it can survive."

Now that climate change is driving up ocean temperatures, there are
fears that these acclimatisation periods will become shorter or
disappear completely.

To get an idea of how warming waters might affect corals, Ainsworth and
her colleagues studied patterns of sea surface temperatures at
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef over the last three decades.

They found that during that time, 75 per cent of heatwaves were preceded
by moderately warm temperatures. These can help cut coral mortality by
50 per cent.

More heat, more stress

They then modelled future scenarios and found that this proportion may
drop to 22 per cent if sea surface temperatures rise by 2 °C, as could
occur by 2100.

What’s more, they found that an increase in local water temperature of
just 0.5 °C can lead to loss of this adaptation mechanism.

"We will no longer be getting a situation where corals have a small
stress, a period of recovery due to water cooling, and then a big
stress," says Ainsworth. "What we’ll see is an accumulation of one big
stress."

Survival strategies

Their experiments also confirmed the importance of practice runs,
showing that corals developed a number of heat resistance strategies as
the water warmed up.

"They upregulated their heat shock responses and all these other
molecular mechanisms that prevented damage to the cells during the next
stress," says Ainsworth.

But increasing sea temperatures caused by climate change will see that
gap between the preparation period and the peak stress disappear, says
study co-author Scott Heron of the US National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.

Not too late

"Those temperatures will no longer drop below the stress levels," says
Heron. "So instead of a gap to recover between the preparation period
and the peak stress, the corals have an extended period of stress."

If these predictions are born out, coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef
could dwindle to less than 5 per cent by the end of the century.

Nevertheless, it is not too late to turn things around. The researchers’
modelling studies demonstrated that aggressive efforts to curb
greenhouse gas emissions would result in no net decline in coral cover
by the end of the century.

"I think we do still have hope, we should never give up," says Ainsworth.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

17 April, 2016

They're finally listening!

Skeptics have been pointing out for years that the ice cores from
past geological eras show CO2 increases lagging BEHIND temperature
rises, disproving the alleged link to global warming. Heretofore
the Warmists have just ignored that in their high and mighty way.
But as the temperature "hiatus" gets longer and longer -- broken only by
El Nino -- they are definitely getting more defensive. So in the
latest edition of "New Scientist" (the Warmist house magazine) Catherine
Brahic and Michael Le Page try to wriggle out of the pesky timing
of past CO2 spikes. See below.

Their argument is not
totally illogical, just very implausible. They say that past
temperature rises were caused by "other things", not by CO2. It is
only recent temperature rises that were caused by CO2. They
realize however that a lot of people are going to say "Hee Haw" to that
profoundly silly argument so end up saying:

"To repeat, the
evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas depends mainly on physics, not on
the correlation with past temperature, which tells us nothing about
cause and effect"

But the physics is a weak reed to lean on as
well. Their theories regularly seem to overlook that a heated
atmospheric molecule will radiate its heat in all directions -- so only a
small percentage of the emitted radiation will hit the earth. But
CO2 is also small percentage of the atmosphere so only a small
percentage of a small percentage of radiation will impact the
earth. So on theory as well as on observed fact, CO2 will have
negligible effect on terrestrial temperature.

So every point of their argument is feeble and improbable -- far too feeble and improbable to support policy prescriptions

And
their claim that "the correlation with past temperature tells us
nothing about cause and effect" is very contentious. David Hume
held that regular temporal priority was the WHOLE of cause. So
there are respectable philosophical grounds for saying that warming DOES
cause CO2 emissions, not vice versa.

Over to Catherine Brahic and Michael Le Page

That's Catherine, a New Scientist editor. Her research background is in neuroanatomy

And that's Michael Le Page. Isn't he a handsome devil?

Sometimes
a house gets warmer even when the central heating is turned off. Does
this prove that its central heating does not work? Of course not.
Perhaps it’s a hot day outside, or the oven’s been left on for hours.

Just as there’s more than one way to heat a house, so there’s more than one way to heat a planet.

Ice
cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to
rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty
about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is
younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been
800 years or more.

Initial warming

This proves that rising
CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of
these ice ages – but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It
certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet.

We
know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain
frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us that gases
with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet
would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more
CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.

What is more, CO2
is just one of several greenhouses gases, and greenhouse gases are just
one of many factors affecting the climate. There is no reason to expect
a perfect correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in the past:
if there is a big change in another climate "forcing", the correlation
will be obscured.

Orbital variations

So why has Earth
regularly switched between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods in
the past million years? It has long been thought that this is due to
variations in Earth’s orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles. These change
the amount and location of solar energy reaching Earth. However, the
correlation is not perfect and the heating or cooling effect of these
orbital variations is small. It has also long been recognised that they
cannot fully explain the dramatic temperature switches between ice ages
and interglacials.

So if orbital changes did cause the recent ice
ages to come and go, there must also have been some kind of feedback
effect that amplified the changes in temperatures they produced. Ice is
one contender: as the great ice sheets that covered large areas of the
planet during the ice ages melted, less of the Sun’s energy would have
been reflected back into space, accelerating the warming. But the
melting of ice lags behind the beginning of interglacial periods by far
more than the rises in CO2.

Another feedback contender, suggested
over a century ago, is CO2. In the past decade, detailed studies of ice
cores have shown there is a remarkable correlation between CO2 levels
and temperature over the past half million years (see Vostok ice cores
show constant CO2 as temperatures fell).

Rising together

It
takes about 5000 years for an ice age to end and, after the initial 800
year lag, temperature and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rise
together for a further 4200 years.

What seems to have happened at
the end of the recent ice ages is that some factor – most probably
orbital changes – caused a rise in temperature. This led to an increase
in CO2, resulting in further warming that caused more CO2 to be released
and so on: a positive feedback that amplified a small change in
temperature. At some point, the shrinking of the ice sheets further
amplified the warming.

Models suggest that rising greenhouse
gases, including CO2, explain about 40% of the warming as the ice ages
ended. The figure is uncertain because it depends on how the extent of
ice coverage changed over time, and there is no way to pin this down
precisely.

Biological activity

The source of this extra
carbon was the oceans, but why did they release CO2 as the planet began
to warm? Many factors played a role and the details are still far from
clear.

CO2 is less soluble in warmer water, but its release as a
result of warming seawater can explain only part of the increase in CO2.
And the reduction in salinity as ice melted would have partly
counteracted this effect.

A reduction in biological activity may
have played a bigger role. Tropical oceans tend to release CO2, while
cooler seas soak up CO2 from the atmosphere as phytoplankton grow and
fall to the ocean floor. Changes in factors such as winds, ice cover and
salinity would have cut productivity, leading to a rise in CO2.

Runaway prevention

The
ice ages show that temperature can determine CO2 as well as CO2 driving
temperature. Some sceptics – not scientists – have seized upon this
idea and are claiming that the relation is one way, that temperature
determines CO2 levels but CO2 levels do not affect temperature.

To
repeat, the evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas depends mainly on
physics, not on the correlation with past temperature, which tells us
nothing about cause and effect. And while the rises in CO2 a few hundred
years after the start of interglacials can only be explained by rising
temperatures, the full extent of the temperature increases over the
following 4000 years can only be explained by the rise in CO2 levels.

What
is more, further back in past there are examples of warmings triggered
by rises in greenhouse gases, such as the Palaeo-Eocene Thermal Maximum
55 millions years ago (see Climate myths: It’s been far warmer in the
past, what’s the big deal?).

Finally, if higher temperatures lead
to more CO2 and more CO2 leads to higher temperatures, why doesn’t this
positive feedback lead to a runaway greenhouse effect? There are
various limiting factors that kick in, the most important being that
infrared radiation emitted by Earth increases exponentially with
temperature, so as long as some infrared can escape from the atmosphere,
at some point heat loss catches up with heat retention.

Bill
Nye, "the science guy", revealed he is openly favorable to the idea of
jailing ‘global warming’ skeptics at the Hague as "war criminals."
Nye was confronted with environmental activists Robert F. Kennedy’s
call to jail climate skeptics for treason and lock them up at the Hague.

Nye openly pondered the idea that climate skeptics deserve
jail. Climate Hustle’s Marc Morano asked Nye in an exclusive interview,
"What is your thought on jailing skeptics as war criminals?"Nye responded: "Well, we’ll see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail the guys from ENRON?"

Nye
added, "For me as a taxpayer and voter — the introduction of this
extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a
public citizen."

Nye was interviewed in New York City’s Central
Park for the upcoming May 2 nationwide theatrical release of the global
warming skeptic film "Climate Hustle" which has its Washington DC
Capitol Hill premiere on April 14 at the House Science Committee.

Climate Hustle‘s Marc Morano, asked Nye:

Morano:
"We interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RJK Jr., the environmentalists.
He said climate ‘deniers’, his words, Energy CEO’s belong at the Hague
with three square meals and a cot with all of the other war criminals.
What is your thought on that and do you think some of the rhetoric on
your side — as I am sure both sides — gets too carried away. What is
your thought on jailing skeptics as war criminals?"

Nye: "Well, we’ll see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail the guys from ENRON?"

Morano: "Interesting."

Nye:
"So, we will see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail people from
the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not
addictive and so on?

And you think about in these cases — for me
as a taxpayer and voter — the introduction of this extreme doubt about
climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen. So I
can see where people are very concerned about this and are pursuing
criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussion like this."

Morano
also asked Nye about the "chilling effect" of threatening
investigations and jail to scientists who dissent on man-made global
warming claims.

Nye responded: "That there is a chilling effect
on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change — I think is
good. The extreme doubt about climate change people – without going too
far afield here – are leaving the world worse than they found it
because they are keeping us from getting to work. They are holding us
back."

What we put on our plates has a much greater effect on the emissions driving climate change than most people are aware of.

"The
unsung contributor to climate change is the meat industry, which adds
as much CO2 as the entire transport industry combined," said Pershin.

Total
emissions from the livestock industry account for half of Australia’s
greenhouse gas emissions, and a third worldwide once land-clearing is
factored in.

If worldwide meat consumption continues to increase
at current rates, we can expect a 76 per cent increase in agricultural
emissions by 2050. This would neutralise the positive impacts of any
other mitigation strategies, if and when they’re actually implemented.

Reducing
per capita meat consumption by 25 per cent could, on the other hand,
result in a 51 per cent decline in agricultural emissions over the same
period. Such reductions in meat consumption are well within recommended
nutritional guidelines.

By far the biggest footprint comes from
beef and lamb, thanks largely to the land-clearing required for pasture.
Reducing red meat consumption would result in savings not only for our
overall carbon budget, but also the budget required to tackle climate
change.

"If the average daily consumption of meat were to be
reduced by 22 per cent, the cost of staying within the worldwide target
of two degrees warming could be halved," said Pershin.

Saving
emissions-intensive red meat for special occasions is one action that
can keep us within our carbon budget without sacrificing the things we
love.

The Climatarian Challenge

The Climatarian Challenge
is a month-long challenge that begins with an allocation of points
representing the individual’s ‘carbon budget’ – referred to as the
‘carbon foodprint.’

The app allows users to input the portion
size and type for any meat included in a meal, and deducts points from
the budget accordingly.

The higher the carbon footprint of a food
item, the more points are deducted. Eating beef and lamb will quickly
deplete a user’s budget while chicken is a relatively low-budget option.
Meat-free meals keep the budget afloat the longest.

To survive
the Climatarian Challenge, the user must reach the end of the month with
at least a few points remaining in their carbon budget.

Former Army General Completely Dismantles Claim Global Warming Causes War

Former
U.S. Army Gen. Robert Scales took on claims by the Obama administration
that global warming is America’s biggest national security threat and
that rising temperatures will cause more violent conflict to break out
around the world.

"The administration’s new-found passion to
connect climate change to war is an example of faulty theories that rely
for relevance on politically-correct imaginings rather than established
historical precedent," Scales told senators during a Wednesday hearing
on environmental policy. "The point is that in today’s wars,
politically-correct theories inserted into a battle plan might well
extend war needlessly and get soldiers killed."

Scales is a
decorated Vietnam War veteran who served in the U.S. Army for 34 years
before retiring in 2000. While in the military, he commanded artillery
and was eventually tapped to head the Army Training and Doctrine
Command. Scales became the commandant of the U.S. Army War College in
the late 1990s, just before he retired.

Special: No Interest Until 2018 With These Credit CardsNow,
Scales is an author, historian and news commentator who’s been highly
critical of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and appeared before
Congress this week to debunk claims that global warming would cause
more wars.

"The theories linking climate change to war come from a
larger body of political thought that ascribes human conflict to what
we call the ‘global trends’ school," Scales said.

"What
we know is that — as human beings are placed under strain, then bad
things happen," Obama told CBS News in 2015. "And, you know, if you look
at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start
lacking food, when people — are not able to make a living or take care
of their families — that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous."

"You
are part of the first generation of officers to begin your service in a
world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us,"
Obama told Coast Guard graduates in May 2015. "Climate change will shape
how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip, and protect
their infrastructure, today and for the long-term."

Scales disagrees and gave a lengthy rebuttal of the claim global warming would drive more people to desperation and warfare.

"Never
in the written history of warfare — from Megiddo in 1,500 B.C. to the
Syrian Civil War today — is there any evidence that wars are caused by
warmer air," Scales said.

"At best, climate change might over
centuries contribute minutely to the course of warfare — the key word is
‘contributed,’" he said. "Climate change will never cause wars, thus it
can never actually be a threat to national security."

"Where
does the administration get their facts about climate change and war?
Well, first they contend that a warming planet causes draught, which
leads to mass migration away from areas creeping desertification,"
Scales continued.

"To be sure, rising temperatures combined with
overgrazing in places such as Central Africa have caused displacement of
peoples, but the misery of these peoples leads to, well, misery, not
war," he added. "Tribes striving to exert to exist in these often
horrific environmental conditions have little energy left to declare war
against their neighbor."

"The nations of Central Africa are
gripped in conflict started by Boko Haram in Nigeria Al Shabaab in
Somalia, but these transnational terrorists are motivated to kill by the
factors that have always caused nations or entities masquerading as
nations to start wars," Scales said, referring to things like hatreds
based on ethnicity, culture and religion.

Scales also took aim at what he called the "hypocrisy" within the scientific community.

"It’s
interesting to note the hypocrisy within the scientific communities
that argue for a connection between climate change and national
security," he said. "Scientists generally agree on the long-term
consequences of global warming. Radical environmentalists delight in
excoriating in the so-called ‘junk science’ espoused by ‘climate change
deniers,’ but they’re less than enthusiastic in questioning the ‘junk
social science’ that environmentalists and their beltway fellow
travelers use to connect climate change to war."

Gardeners
may have to dig out those nuisance nettles by hand after MEPs voted to
ban a key chemical in weedkiller. They want the herbicide glyphosate
outlawed after the World Health Organisation last year said it was
'probably carcinogenic'.

However, scientific opinion on the
substance is divided, with the European Food Safety Authority insisting
it is unlikely to cause tumours.

Britain also supports the continued use of the chemical, which is found in popular brands of weedkiller including Roundup.

The
existing licence for glyphosate expires in June and the European
Commission is set to decide whether to approve its use for another 15
years.

MEPs want the EC to allow farmers to use the chemical for another seven years, while banning it for 'non-professionals'.

Gardeners fear the proposals will force shops to stop selling most common weedkillers and force them to use manual methods.

Raoul
Curtis-Machin, of the Horticultural Trades Association, told the Daily
Telegraph that alternatives to glyphosate were 'not as effective'.

But organic food charity The Soil Association backed the vote by MEPs and urged gardeners to weed by hand instead.

The
group, which has been campaigning against glyphosate, also suggested
gardeners use 'livestock, such as pigs, chicken, geese' or weeding
techniques using flames or hot water.

The Soil Association also
proposed covering the ground with a mulch or designing gardens in a way
that 'limit areas where weeds can become a problem'.

A spokesman
for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: 'We
recognise the importance of effective pesticides to farmers and we
remain entirely committed to making them available where the regulators
are satisfied and scientific evidence shows they do not pose
unacceptable risks to human health or the environment.

'The
European Food Safety Authority did not find that glyphosate posed a risk
to human health and UK experts agree. We now await the decision by the
European Commission on the renewal of its approval.'

Monsanto,
which manufacturers Roundup, said there was 'no scientific reason why
glyphosate should not continue to be available for gardeners'.

President
Obama’s war on coal has bagged its biggest trophy to date: the
bankruptcy filing by the largest U.S. coal company, Peabody Energy.

Make
no mistake about it, though, Peabody’s management and that of the rest
of coal industry bears much of the blame for its own demise. It ought to
serve as a lesson for everyone else targeted by take-no-prisoners
progressives.

Peabody’s bankruptcy filing follows that of other
major coal companies including, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, and
Patriot Coal. The irony is that coal is actually the world’s fastest
growing source of energy, according to the International Energy Agency.
So what happened?

Even before Obama vowed to "bankrupt" the coal
industry in a 2008 interview with the editorial board of the San
Francisco Chronicle, the coal industry had already allowed the seeds of
its destruction to take root. It had failed to believe global warming
hysteria was an existential threat. The industry thought the demand for
cheap and reliable electricity combined with the power of politicians
representing coal states would suffice as a defense against attack. But
contrary to the myths propagated by global warming activists, the coal
industry was never a serious funder of climate skeptics.

This
strategy was completely upended when decidedly anti-coal Obama became
president and Republicans lost control of Congress. Not only did an
unprecedented coal industry-hating "progressive" government come to
power, but also an up-and-coming new technology for producing natural
gas was coming into its own. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal
drilling, commonly referred to as "fracking," began to change the U.S.
energy market.

With respect to the anti-coal Obama administration
and Congress, the coal industry thought that problem could be managed.
Maybe even a deal could get cut. A senior Peabody executive told me in
the spring of 2009 that it supported the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade
bill because it would settle the issue and provide a path forward for
the industry. At this time, much of the coal industry was operating
under the illusion that carbon dioxide emissions could be affordably
captured and stored underground, so the modest emissions cuts
contemplated by the bill could be achieved.

Although
Waxman-Markey squeaked by in a 219-212 House vote, it was never brought
up in the Senate and other Senate efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill
faltered — thanks largely to the coincidental rise of the tea party.
With the failure of cap-and-trade in Congress, Obama turned to the
regulatory agencies he controlled to wage war on the coal industry, the
most powerful of which was the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA
began issuing a series of devastating anti-coal regulations.

The
coal industry was ill-prepared to fight the EPA — an aggressively
arrogant, if not entirely rogue, activist agency. The EPA took advantage
of the fact that its rules didn’t target the coal industry directly,
but instead pressured the coal industry’s customers — coal-burning
electric utilities. The EPA’s regulations forced the utilities to reduce
emissions from their coal plants.

The EPA regulation known as
the Mercury Air Transport Standard was so expensive for utilities to
implement that it made more economic sense just to shutter many of their
coal-burning power plants — a task made easier by the surge in cheap
natural gas and the fact that the moribund Obama economy has not
expanded in such a way as to necessitate an meaningful increases in
electricity generation.

It’s not that natural gas is necessarily a
less expensive way to generate electricity, but it became
cost-competitive with coal. And given the regulatory and political
pressure on utilities to not burn coal, utilities began switching from
coal to gas wherever possible. The natural gas glut has also placed a
price ceiling on coal that dramatically thinned the profit margin from
coal mining. As the Obama administration has slow-walked the approval of
natural gas export terminals, the gas glut is here to stay.

What
about exporting U.S. coal to the rest of world, which is in the process
of building 2,440 new coal plants? The coal industry does export some
coal, but that has been made difficult by environmental activists who
have blocked new rail lines and coal export terminals. And while China
and, especially, India are burning more and more coal, they are
increasing exploiting their own domestic supplies for economic reasons.
So global coal prices are way down, again, pressuring export profit
margins.

While the entire story of the U.S. coal industry’s
demise is worthy of much more discussion, it can be summarized as
follows: The coal industry’s political enemies have successfully used
expensive, heavy-handed, junk science-fueled regulation which, in
combination with an unforeseeable coincidental glut of cheap natural
gas, has virtually broken the coal industry’s back.

What is the
future of the coal industry? About one-third of our electricity still
comes from coal, though that may shrink further. Under current
conditions — a natural gas glut, constrained energy demand and heavy EPA
regulation — there will not be much profit in coal for the foreseeable
future even though we will still rely on it for much electricity.

The
best scenario for what’s left of the coal industry is if Republicans
win the White House and maintain control of Congress. That would likely
relieve the regulatory pressure on the industry and some of the natural
gas glut since Republicans would greenlight natural gas exports.

Even
if Democrats win, the coal industry is not likely going away, although
its management will change dramatically. As I forecast here last year,
no one will leave trillions of dollars worth of coal in the ground,
especially since future governments will need cash to run the welfare
state. So instead, Democrat-friendly billionaires will buy coal
companies for a song, politically rehabilitate the fuel, donate to their
political allies, and profit.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

Global
temperatures spiked during the last half of 2015 as a result of the
strong El Nino and were still at very high levels relative-to-normal as
recently as last month. In addition, global sea ice appeared to be
impacted by El Nino as it took a steep dive during much of 2015 and
remained at well below-normal levels going into this year. In the past
couple of months, however, El Nino has begun to collapse and will likely
flip to a moderate or strong La Nina (colder-than-normal water) by
later this year. In rather quick fashion, global temperatures have
seemingly responded to the unfolding collapse of El Nino and global sea
ice has actually rebounded in recent weeks to near normal levels.
--Paul Dorian, Vencor Weather, 11 April 2016

Ministers set up the Green Deal
four years ago to encourage homeowners to save energy by installing loft
and wall insulation and more efficient boilers at no up-front cost.

But
the National Audit Office said that while the 'ambitious' aim 'looked
good on paper', it failed to deliver any meaningful benefit.

The
scheme, pioneered by former Lib Dem energy secretary Chris Huhne, even
increased suppliers' costs – and as a result energy bills – as firms
paid out more money to meet the obligations.

Under the Green
Deal, providers met the upfront costs of installing efficiency measures
and householders paid the money back from savings they made on their
energy bills.

It found that while 1.4million homes had benefited
from measures ranging from new boilers to insulation by the end of the
last year, just 1 per cent of households took out Green Deal loans. The
14,000 households which did fell far below expectations.

The
figure was blamed on the Government's design and implementation of the
scheme which failed to persuade householders energy efficiency measures
were worth paying for, it was said.

The low take-up on the now abandoned scheme meant it cost the taxpayer £17,000 per loan plan, the report found.

Amyas
Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: 'The Department [of
Energy and Climate Change] now needs to be more realistic about
consumers' and suppliers' motivations when designing schemes in future
to ensure it achieves it aims.'

Last year Energy Secretary Amber
Rudd announced that the scheme would close with immediate effect because
of low take-up and to protect taxpayers from further losses. Take-up
was low because of high interest rates and the fact that loans were
attached to a property, like a mortgage, so had to be paid off or passed
on to the next owner if the applicant moved.

The scheme, which
cost £240million to set up and run, including grants to stimulate
demand, did not deliver additional energy or carbon savings, which would
have been made anyway through other schemes.

An investigation
into the Green Deal Finance Company, set up to provide finance for the
scheme, also found a £25million loan from the Government was unlikely to
be paid back by the company. The company paid 13 members of staff
£1.3million in 2014. The NAO concluded the Green Deal did not achieve
value for money and delivered 'negligible' carbon savings.

The
design of the 'energy company obligation' (ECO), which requires
suppliers to install energy saving measures in homes to cut carbon
emissions, to support the Green Deal reduced its value for money too.

The
£3billion ECO scheme, costs of which are passed on to consumer bills,
saved only around 30 per cent of the carbon emissions of previous
programmes.

Taken together, the Government's various energy
efficiency schemes in the past few years cost £94 for each ton of carbon
they saved, significantly more than the £34 per ton of carbon dioxide
of the schemes they replaced.

Meg Hillier MP, chairman of the
Commons public accounts committee, said the Department had been 'flying
blind' when it came to implementing the scheme. She said: ' [It has]
cost over £3billion to date, but the Department has achieved little
energy savings compared to previous schemes.'

Expect
Barack Obama to pull out all the stops before he vacates the White
House in January. That includes a sleazy effort to handcuff the next
president — assuming that person is not Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders — when it comes to decoupling the U.S. from the Paris climate
accord. Here’s how:

The Washington Post says, "When at least 55
countries, who account for at least 55 percent of global emissions, have
all moved to join the agreement … [it] then enters into force after a
30 day wait period. According to data just released by the U.N., the
U.S. and China accounted for around 38 percent of emissions, meaning
that if the two act swiftly, it will be much easier to meet the
emissions threshold." The signing off process gets underway on April 22,
and since the U.S. and China are already on board it won’t take much to
authorize the accord.

But timing is everything, and the speed at
which the Obama administration is pushing to formalize the agreement
suggests it’s preparing for a worst-case scenario. Article 28 of the
agreement states, "At any time after three years from the date on which
this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may
withdraw from this Agreement." Furthermore, explains the Post, "[T]he
withdrawal itself doesn’t take effect until ‘expiry of one year from the
date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal.’
So that’s 4 years — the length of a presidential term."

It’s a
sordid strategy. The Obama administration insists the agreement is
legally non-binding so as to avoid the whole "treaty" thing in the
Senate. But that means, under normal circumstances, a successor can
simply reject it. Still, Obama’s savvy play here is to create a
situation in which deviating from the deal’s terms once it becomes
official results in a severe backlash from international partners.
Consequently, the repeal process becomes convoluted. Arizona State
University’s Daniel Bodansky claims, "It was not negotiated by the U.S.
(or any other country) as a means of binding the next president." Maybe,
maybe not. But that’s not going to stop Obama from trying. Republicans
had a chance to defund the measure last year, but ultimately failed.
They will have only themselves to blame if the next president faces
legal hurdles by trying to repeal it.

Every
time a north wind blows hot air over Adelaide, some Chicken Little
cries "Global Warming". And when an El Nino predictably causes a hot
year like 1998 or 2015/16, some sensation-seeking celebrity will trumpet
"hottest year eevah".

They are watching short-term weather
ripples and waves and ignoring the underlying climate tide. Daily,
monthly and yearly temperature records will always be equalled or
broken. That is what weather does – it fluctuates.

In the medium
term, Earth temperature trends are influenced by variations in solar
activities as evidenced by sun-spot cycles. These variations affect
solar intensity, cosmic rays, clouds and Earth temperature, causing
medium-term climatic events like the Little Ice Age and the Modern
Warming. There are persuasive signs that recent solar activity has
peaked. So maybe we can expect cooler weather soon.

But to see
what the climate is doing we must look longer-term and study the glacial
cycles. The Milankovitch cycles of Earth in the solar system control
these.

We live in the Holocene warm interval within the
Pleistocene Ice Age – a time of recurring cycles of ice separated by
brief warm interludes. Earth’s climate is driven by solar system cycles,
and climate changes appear first in the Northern Hemisphere which has
more land in the sensitive sub-polar regions. The GRIP ice core from
Greenland shows the long-term average temperature there peaked 7,000
years ago and has trended down for at least 3,000 years.

Greenland is now cooler than 8000 year ago:

We
will still have hot days and heat waves, El Nino will still bring
droughts and floods, sea ice will come and go, but the climate
mid-summer has passed and the temperature tide is going out. Spreading
alarm about short-term temperature fluctuations of a fraction of a
degree is a distraction.

Promoting damaging energy and land
management policies designed to prevent warming, just as the next
climate winter approaches, will be seen by future generations as
bizarre.

Pollsters should ask how much Americans will pay to set an example to the world

Public
opinion polls are regularly cited by politicians and activists to
support government action on climate change. Yet these surveys rarely
make meaningful contributions to the public policy debate since they ask
about issues that do not matter, while ignoring issues that do matter.

Happily,
most polling companies have matured to the point that they no longer
ask respondents whether they think ‘climate change is real’ or whether
they believe there is a scientific debate about the causes of climate
change. Public understanding of the inevitability of climate change on a
dynamic planet and the massive uncertainty about future climate states
has rendered such questions pointless.

Yet pollsters still have a long way to go before their climate change surveys should be taken seriously.

Gallup’s annual environmental poll, the results of which were released throughout March, is a case in point.

It
does not matter whether Americans have heard that "scientists recently
reported that 2015 was the Earth’s warmest year on record," as Gallup
misleadingly informed respondents in the preamble to one of its survey
questions. While some scientists say 2015 temperatures were exceptional,
many others do not. They understand that, due to the uncertainties in
the early part of the record, no one knows if temperatures today are
higher than in earlier decades.

But the issue is irrelevant
anyways. What difference does it make if one year exceeded the previous
warmest year by hundredths or even tenths of a degree? Changes of that
magnitude are not noticeable in the real world and appear only after
complicated manipulation of the data.

Similarly, Gallup’s
question about whether Americans "generally believe these reports [about
2015’s supposed record] are accurate or not accurate" has no bearing on
public policy formulation. The accuracy of computations of trivial
changes is obviously unimportant.

Gallup asked respondents about
the causes of the supposed "record temperatures in 2015." Again, aside
from scientists working in the field, who cares? The reasons for such
tiny variations are not relevant to policy discussions.

The question that does matter is:

Will
emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from human activities cause dangerous
global warming and other climate problems in the foreseeable future? It
is only future climate changes that should be of concern to policy
makers. The past is history. We cannot change it.

And for the
issue to be worthy of public debate, let alone a billion dollars a day,
the amount now spent around the world on climate finance, any forecast
temperature rise would have to be expected to be dangerous.

Even
then, we would have to know, with a reasonable degree of confidence,
that such warming, if it occurs, will be as a result of our CO2
emissions. The issue at hand is not a generic "human-caused climate
change," one of the possible answers provided by Gallup in its survey.
The debate, and indeed the subject of the Obama administration’s Clean
Power Plan (CPP), concerns one particular type of human-caused climate
change, namely that supposed caused by our CO2 emissions.

Of
course, the answer from most of the public to the above hypothetical
poll question would have to be, "I don’t know." How could they? Even the
world’s leading scientists don’t really know the answer. "Climate is
one of the most challenging open problems in modern science," according
to University of Western Ontario applied mathematician Dr. Chris Essex,
an expert in the mathematical models that are the basis of climate
concerns. "Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate
problem can never be solved."

A question that would make sense to poll Americans on would be:

"How
much are you prepared to pay in increased taxes and other costs to
reduce America’s CO2 emissions to encourage other countries to follow
suit so as to possibly avert dangerous climate change that may someday
happen?"

That is the real question. After all, Environmental
Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy has admitted that plans
such as the CPP will have no measurable impact on global climate. She
has repeated informed Congressional hearings that the purpose of the CPP
is to set an example for the world to follow.

But developing
countries, the source of most of today’s emissions, have indicated that
they have no intention of limiting their development for ‘climate
protection’ purposes. In fact, all United Nations climate change
treaties contain an out clause for developing nations so that they need
not make reductions if it interferes with their "first and overriding
priorities" of development and poverty alleviation.

Most people
would pay nothing at all to support an improbable hope that other
countries follow America to possibly avert a hypothetical future
problem. But pollsters have never asked the public about this important
issue. It’s about time they did.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

In
a "fact sheet" issued by the White House in conjunction with a climate
change report made public last week, one of the impacts of increasing
temperatures is the deaths of thousands of American people over the
course of one summer.

"Extreme heat can be expected to cause an
increase in the number of premature deaths, from thousands to tens of
thousands, each summer, which will outpace projected decreases in deaths
from extreme cold," the fact sheet stated.

"One model projected
an increase, from a 1990 baseline for more than 200 American cities, of
more than an additional 11,000 deaths during the summer in 2030 and more
than an additional 27,000 deaths during the summer in 2100," the fact
sheet said.

The summary of the climate change report, titled "The
Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A
Scientific Assessment," states that climate change is "a significant
threat to the American people" and that the findings in the report
"represent an improvement in scientific confidence in the link between
climate change and a broad range of threats to public health."

More self-righteous internationalists doing what they do best -- waste money

The
World Bank, whose goals are to end extreme poverty and promote shared
prosperity worldwide by 2030, announced last week that it will turn its
attention to climate change.

"The World Bank Group’s Climate
Change Action Plan, adopted today, is designed to help countries meet
their Paris COP21 pledges and manage increasing climate impacts," the
World Bank said in a press release on Thursday, referring to the UN
climate change summit in Paris.

The Climate Change Action Plan
"lays out concrete actions to help countries deliver on their NDCs," or
Nationally Determined Contributions, "and sets ambitious targets for
2020 in high-impact areas, including clean energy, green transport,
climate-smart agriculture, and urban resilience, as well as in
mobilizing the private sector to expand climate investments in
developing countries."

"Under the Plan, the World Bank
plans to double its current contributions to global renewable energy
capacity, aiming to add 30 gigawatts of capacity and to mobilize $25
billion in private financing for clean energy by 2020," the World Bank
stated.

"The Bank Group will also quadruple funding for
climate-resilient transport, integrate climate into urban planning
through the Global Platform for Sustainable Cities, and boost assistance
for sustainable forest and fisheries management," it stated.

Furthermore,
by 2020, the World Bank plans to "bring early warning systems for
natural disasters to 100 million people." It will also "step up advocacy
and work with countries and companies to put a price on carbon
pollution" and "help countries build climate change into their policies
and planning."

"The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a
member of the World Bank Group and the largest global development
institution focused exclusively on the private sector in developing
countries, aims to increase its climate investments from the current
$2.2 billion a year to a goal of $3.5 billion a year, and will lead on
leveraging an additional $13 billion a year in private sector financing
by 2020," the World Bank announced.

"Climate change poses an
enormous challenge to development," the World Bank said. "By 2050, the
world will have to feed 9 billion people, extend housing and services to
2 billion new urban residents, and provide universal access to
affordable energy, and do so while bringing down global greenhouse gas
emissions to a level that make a sustainable future possible.

"At
the same time, floods, droughts, sea-level rise, threats to water and
food security and the frequency of natural disasters will intensify,
threatening to push 100 million more people into poverty in the next 15
years alone," the World Bank stated.

The
U.S. Department of Energy published data last week with some amazing
revelations — so amazing that most Americans will find them hard to
believe. As a nation, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 2
percent from last year. Over the past 14 years, our carbon emissions
are down more than 10 percent. On a per-unit-of-GDP basis, U.S. carbon
emissions are down by closer to 20 percent.

Even more stunning:
We’ve reduced our carbon emissions more than virtually any other nation
in the world, including most of Europe.

How can this be? We never
ratified the Kyoto Treaty. We never adopted a national cap-and-trade
system, or a carbon tax, as so many of the sanctimonious Europeans have
done.

The answer isn’t that the EPA has regulated CO2 out of the
economy. With strict emission standards, the EPA surely has started to
strangle our domestic industries, such as coal, and our electric
utilities. But that’s not the big story here.

The primary reason
carbon emissions are falling is because of hydraulic fracturing — or
fracking. Some readers now are probably thinking I’ve been drinking or
have lost my mind. Fracking technology for shale oil and gas drilling is
supposed to be evil. Some states have outlawed it. Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders have come out against it in recent weeks. Schoolchildren
have been bombarded with green propaganda about all the catastrophic
consequences of fracking.

They are mostly lies. Fracking is
simply a new way to get at America’s vast storehouse of tens of
trillions of dollars worth of shale oil and gas that lies beneath us,
coast to coast — from California to upstate New York. Fracking produces
massive amounts of natural gas, and, as a consequence, natural gas
prices have fallen in the past decade from above $8 per million BTUs to
closer to $2 this year — a 75 percent reduction — due to the spike in
domestic supplies.

This free fall in prices means that America is
using far more natural gas for heating and electricity and much less
coal. Here is how the International Energy Agency put it: "In the United
States, (carbon) emissions declined by 2 percent, as a large switch
from coal to natural gas use in electricity generation took place."

It
also observes that the decline "was offset by increasing emissions in
most other Asian developing economies and the Middle East, and also a
moderate increase in Europe." We are growing faster than they are and
reducing emissions more than they are, yet these are the nations that
lecture us on polluting. Go figure.

Here at home, this market-driven transition has caused a pro-natural gas celebration by the green groups, right?

Hardly.
Groups like the Sierra Club and their billionaire disciples have bet
the farm on wind and solar power. They’ve launched anti-fracking
campaigns and "beyond natural gas" advertising campaigns. But wind and
solar are hopelessly uncompetitive when natural gas is so plentiful and
so cheap. So are electric cars.

The media also have gotten this
story completely wrong. Last week The New York Times celebrated the
DOE’s emissions findings as evidence that governmental iron-fist
policies are working to stop global warming. For the first time "since
the start of the Industrial Revolution," the Times argued, "GDP growth
and carbon emissions have been decoupled."

The Times pretends
that this development is because of green energy, but that’s a fantasy.
Wind and solar still account for only 3 percent of U.S. energy.

So
here is the real story in a flash: Thanks to fracking and horizontal
drilling technologies, we are producing more natural gas than ever
before. Natural gas is a wonder fuel: It is cheap. It is abundant.
America has more of it than anyone else — enough to last several hundred
years. And it is clean-burning. Even Nancy Pelosi inadvertently
admitted this several years ago before someone had to whisper in her ear
that, um, natural gas is a fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, the left has
declared war on a technology that has done more to reduce carbon
emissions and real pollution emissions than all the green programs ever
invented. Maybe the reason is that they aren’t so much against pollution
as they are against progress.

Many
have suspected that U.S. political intervention in climate science has
corrupted the outcome. The new emergence of an old 1995 document from
the U.S. State Department to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change confirms those suspicions, or at least gives the
allegation credence enough to ask questions.

It’s troubling that a
FOIA lawsuit came up empty – "no such correspondence in our files" –
when the old 1995 document was requested from the U.S. State Department
late last year. This raises a certain ironic question: If I have a copy
of your document, how come you don’t?"

State’s response is also
somewhat unbelievable because the document that fell into my hands
showed State’s date-stamp, the signature of a State Department official
and the names of persons still living – along with 30 pages of detailed
instructions on how to change the IPCC’s science document and the
summary for policymakers.

The document itself consists of a
three-page cover letter to Sir John Houghton, head of IPCC Working Group
I (Science), from Day Mount, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Acting,
Environment and Development, United States Department of State, along
with the thirty-page instruction set with line-by-line "suggestions,"
written by scientist Robert Watson and others.

Among the more
revealing tidbits is a remark scolding a scientist for being honest
about the weakness of aerosol forcing data: "We clearly cannot use
aerosol forcing as the trigger of our smoking gun, and then make a
generalized appeal to uncertainty to exclude these effects from the
forward-looking modeling analysis."

One instruction was to change
a correct statement about warming rates into a flat lie: "Change
‘continue to rise’ to ‘rise by even greater amounts’ to provide a sense
of magnitude of the extended change."

The entire document is too
convoluted and technical to summarize here, so it is posted here in PDF
form for your detailed examination. The document posted here is
unchanged and unaltered in any way from exactly what I received from a
well known and credible source that must remain anonymous to avoid harm
or retribution.

There is evidence that the document is authentic
based on a specific mention in the 2000 Hoover Institution report by S.
Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, "Climate Policy—From Rio to Kyoto: A
Political Issue for 2000—and Beyond."

The 1995 document raises
2016 questions about the State Department’s actions in the subsequent
United National IPCC Assessment Reports. What did they do? Where are the
correspondence and instructions to change the science in all the IPCC
Assessments? What is the Obama State Department doing to corrupt climate
science to its forward its radical social and political agenda? Some of
that is obvious. It’s the clandestine part we need to know.

I don’t expect our government to answer truthfully. If they did, they might have to start a RICO investigation of themselves.

Read the State Department document and decide for yourself whether these questions are worth asking.

The campaign to attach legal consequences to supposed "climate denial" has now crossed a fateful line:

The
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from
Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that
attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on
climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation
campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led
by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President
Al Gore….

The subpoena requests a decade’s worth of
communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents
regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including
private donor information. It demands that CEI produce these materials
from 20 years ago, from 1997-2007, by April 30, 2016.

CEI General
Counsel Sam Kazman said the group "will vigorously fight to quash this
subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech
and association." More coverage of the subpoena at the Washington Times
and Daily Caller.

This article in the
Observer details the current push to expand the probe of climate
advocacy, which first enlisted New York AG Eric Schneiderman and then
California’s Kamala Harris — into a broader coalition of AGs, with
Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands just having signed on. More than a
dozen others, such as Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, seem to be
signaling support but have not formally jumped in. More: Peggy Little,
Federalist Society.

CEI people, many of them longtime friends of
this site, have been active critics of the Schneiderman effort, with
Hans Bader, a senior attorney there, highly critical just a week ago.

In
these working groups of attorneys general, legal efforts are commonly
parceled out among the states in a deliberate and strategic way, with
particular tasks being assigned to AGs who have comparative advantage in
some respect (such as an unusually favorable state law to work with, or
superior staff expertise or media access). Why would one of the most
politically sensitive tasks of all — opening up a legal attack against
CEI, a long-established nonprofit well known in Washington and in
libertarian and conservative ideological circles — be assigned to the AG
from a tiny and remote jurisdiction? Is it that a subpoena coming from
the Virgin Islands is logistically inconvenient to fight in some way, or
that local counsel capable of standing up to this AG are scarce on the
ground there, or that a politician in the Caribbean is less exposed to
political backlash from CEI’s friends and fans than one in a major media
center? Or what?

I recommend checking out the new Free Speech
and Science Project, which intends to fight back against criminalization
of advocacy by, among other things, organizing legal defense and
seeking to hold officials accountable for misusing the law to attack
advocacy.

This is happening at a time of multiple, vigorous,
sustained legal attacks on what had been accepted freedoms of advocacy
and association. As I note in a new piece at Cato, Sen. Elizabeth Warren
has just demanded that the Securities and Exchange Commission
investigate several large corporations that have criticized her pet plan
to impose fiduciary legal duties on retirement advisors, supposedly on
the ground that it is a securities law violation for them to be
conveying to investors a less alarmed view of the regulations’ effect
than they do in making their case to the Labor Department. This is not
particularly compelling as securities law, but it’s great as a way to
chill speech by publicly held businesses.

The original of the article below is graphics intensive so I refer readers to the original if they want to check anything

It’s
fashionable these days to blame everything that goes wrong with
anything on human interference with the climate, and we had yet another
example last week when President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela fingered
drought, El Niño and global warming as the reasons Venezuela’s lights
keep going out. In this post I show that his Excellency has not a leg to
stand on when he makes these claims, but that because no one ever looks
at the data everyone believes him.

From International Business Times: Venezuelan Leader Blames El Niño And Global Warming For Nation’s Energy Crisis

The
fierce El Niño event under way in the Pacific Ocean and warming global
temperatures have helped create the brutal drought now racking
Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro said Wednesday night. Venezuela is
facing its worst drought in almost half a century. The nation depends on
hydropower for nearly two-thirds of its electricity, but the reservoirs
that fuel its facilities are evaporating. Power outages in recent weeks
have forced factories to send workers home early, slowing production,
and many residents are now scrambling to secure enough drinking water
supplies.

The fierce El Niño created the brutal drought now
racking Venezuela, the worst in almost half a century. No pulling of
punches. Boiled down to essentials, however, there are three issues here
– a) is there really a "brutal" drought in Venezuela, b) if so, did the
"fierce" El Niño cause it and c) has global warming made it worse?
We’ll take a look at these issues shortly, but first it’s important to
note that about 70% of Venezuela’s electricity comes from one massive
installation, the Guri dam on the Caroni River (officially the Simon
Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant) which holds back a 4,000 square kilometer
lake, about the same size as Rhode Island or Somerset.

It’s hard
to think of such a huge lake drying up, but that indeed now seems to be
the case. According to this panampost article water levels are now so
low that complete shutdown could result by early May if it doesn’t rain
in the meantime.

But why is Lake Guri drying up? Time to review the possibilities:

1. Drought:

Rainfall
is as always the key variable here, and to check on rainfall around
Lake Guri I selected the five Global Historic Climate Network V2 records
shown in the Figure 2 Google Earth image. They ring Lake Guri except to
the south, where there are no stations.

So where’s the brutal drought? Maybe we’re standing back too far to see it, so let’s zoom in on recent years:

Ciudad
Bolívar had a dry 2015 but rainfall at the other four stations was
about normal. Clearly there is no significant drought in Venezuela at
the moment, brutal or otherwise, or at least not in the area around Lake
Guri.

2. El Niño

The fact that there is no drought in
Venezuela makes the impact of the recent El Niño irrelevant, but I did
some work to see how closely monthly rainfall at the five stations
correlates with the Niño3.4 Index over time anyway. Here are the
results:

We can conclude from these results that ENSO events have historically had little or no impact on rainfall in Venezuela.

3. Temperature:

President
Maduro also claimed that warming temperatures are exacerbating the
"drought", which indeed they could if a) there was a drought and b) the
temperature increases were large enough. But temperatures in Venezuela
haven’t increased that much, if at all. The trend line through the
GHCNv2 temperature record for Ciudad Bolívar, the closest station to
Lake Guri, shows a 0.2C increase at most since 1950:

We can conclude here that Venezuela is not suffering too much from global warming either.

4. Undersupply

This
is of course the real reason. Venezuela does not have either the
installed capacity or the reliable grid network needed to supply the
country’s electricity demand (the retail electricity price in Venezuela
in 2014 was only $0.02/kWh) and it’s being forced to drain Lake Guri to
get whatever electricity it can.

5. Conclusions

President Maduro, that’s four strikes. You’re out.

But
unfortunately he isn’t. If you do a web search for "Venezuela drought"
you will be hard pressed to find a single story that questions whether
there really is a drought there. Everybody accepts that there is. And
while it’s widely acknowledged that Venezuela’s difficulties are largely
a result of mismanagement of its electricity sector it’s still
generally believed that there would be no electricity shortage if there
were no drought. Indeed, it seems that all you have to do these days if
your misguided energy policies happen to plunge your country into
darkness is to go on television and blame it all on some aspect of
climate change and you are off the hook.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

13 April, 2016

Would global warming increase both flooding AND drought?

That
is the prediction that Warmists are attached to. But it runs
counter to basic physics. Warming should cause more evaporation
off the oceans which will in turn fall as rain. So more flooding
would be a reasonable expectation during warming. So how is
warming supposed to cause drought too?

The short answer is
"models" but leaning on them is leaning on a broken reed. A
more substantial answer is that warmer weather will not only evaporate
water off the seas but also off the land. So you may have an
initial drying effect on the land. But wherever the evaporation
comes from, it will end up as rain. So there can be no net loss to
the land. The clouds will give its moisture back plus more
moisture from the oceans. And the earth surface is two thirds
ocean so we are looking at a LOT more rain.

So a recent paper
(below) has caused heartburn among Warmists. It says that the
slight warming of the 20th century did NOT cause drought -- which is
what one would on basic principles expect and which is borne out by
other studies -- e.g."the
proportion of Europe experiencing extreme and/or moderate drought
conditions has changed insignificantly during the 20th century". And another finding for a dry region during C20: "We found no evidence for a decrease either in mean annual rainfall or in the incidence of drought".

Note
also the greening of the Sahel in late C20 and early C21. Instead
of getting drier, the semi-desert Sahel got greener.

So professional Warmist Joe Romm
has rubbished the paper. He says the paper is discredited and
shows that it's conclusions are contradicted by "findings" from Warmist
studies. That contradiction should bother us not at all so let us
look at the academic criticisms of the paper:

ANY scientific
paper is open to criticism, No study is perfect. So the
issue is whether the criticisms discover a fatal error or make an
improbable generaliztion. The criticisms Romm refers to are here. And they are far from totally dismissive. A few quotes:

In
a recent study (Donat et al., 2016, Nature Climate Change,
doi:10.1038/nclimate2941) we found that, when aggregating over the dry
and wet regions of the world, precipitation changes are consistent
between models and observations over the past 60 years. Nevertheless, it
is true that modelling and analysis of precipitation changes are still
related to a number of uncertainties, especially when it comes to
regional changes in precipitation. This is partly related to the large
temporal variability in local precipitation time series, but also
shortcomings in the models with simulating processes related to
precipitation."

And:

I am not too surprised that
there is disagreement for the 20th century as there is a strong
component of random variability evident in the observational record. The
picture of the "wet getting wetter and the dry getting drier" is one
that is very likely to emerge over the course of this century but has
not been evident, or expected, during the 20th century.

And:

If
this paper’s conclusion about model overprediction holds up to further
scrutiny it will be extremely interesting; my own work focuses on
model-data discrepancies so I am particularly interested. But due
to the above aspects of the study, I am not convinced that this
particular conclusion will hold up. We shall see, as I am sure
this result will attract lots of attention."

So the study is not at all as risible as Romm claims. It is just one indication of what is going on.

Accurate
modelling and prediction of the local to continental-scale hydroclimate
response to global warming is essential given the strong impact of
hydroclimate on ecosystem functioning, crop yields, water resources, and
economic security1, 2, 3, 4. However, uncertainty in hydroclimate
projections remains large5, 6, 7, in part due to the short length of
instrumental measurements available with which to assess climate models.
Here we present a spatial reconstruction of hydroclimate variability
over the past twelve centuries across the Northern Hemisphere derived
from a network of 196 at least millennium-long proxy records. We use
this reconstruction to place recent hydrological changes8, 9 and future
precipitation scenarios7, 10, 11 in a long-term context of spatially
resolved and temporally persistent hydroclimate patterns. We find a
larger percentage of land area with relatively wetter conditions in the
ninth to eleventh and the twentieth centuries, whereas drier conditions
are more widespread between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Our
reconstruction reveals that prominent seesaw patterns of alternating
moisture regimes observed in instrumental data12, 13, 14 across the
Mediterranean, western USA, and China have operated consistently over
the past twelve centuries. Using an updated compilation of 128
temperature proxy records15, we assess the relationship between the
reconstructed centennial-scale Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate and
temperature variability. Even though dry and wet conditions occurred
over extensive areas under both warm and cold climate regimes, a
statistically significant co-variability of hydroclimate and temperature
is evident for particular regions. We compare the reconstructed
hydroclimate anomalies with coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation
model simulations and find reasonable agreement during pre-industrial
times. However, the intensification of the twentieth-century-mean
hydroclimate anomalies in the simulations, as compared to previous
centuries, is not supported by our new multi-proxy reconstruction. This
finding suggests that much work remains before we can model hydroclimate
variability accurately, and highlights the importance of using
palaeoclimate data to place recent and predicted hydroclimate changes in
a millennium-long context16, 17.

German
Bavarian Broadcasting, Bayerischer Rundfunk, has a report on wind
energy in the southeastern state that is famous for its Oktoberfest,
dirndls and lederhosen. It appears the brakes have been effectively
applied to the scenery pollution industry.

Bavaria is also home
to some of the country’s most idyllic landscapes. But unfortunately
Germany’s "Greens" have been pushing hard to industrialize this precious
natural treasure – all with the aim of saving the planet. They have
proposed the construction of dozens of wind parks of 200-meter tall
turbines across the country side.

In the early days wind turbines
were viewed as sort of a novelty and many communities even lobbied to
get them. However, as wind parks sprouted across the country, people
woke up to the natural destruction and overall inefficiency the wind
energy has wreaked. Today, the BR report tells us that the tipping point
has been reached: wind parks are no longer welcome; They’re too ugly,
noisy, inefficient and only a very few profit from them at the expense
of the many.

The BR report features one Bavarian village, Obbach,
where a wind park with five 200-meter tall turbines was installed just
800 hundred meters away. Unfortunately for the village the park had been
approved before Germany’s 10-H rule was enacted, and so construction
went ahead much to the dissatisfaction of the village residents. The
10-H rule stipulates that no turbine may be closer to a living area than
10 times its height. Had the rule been enacted sooner, it would not
have been possible to put up the park and the Obbach’s residents would
have been spared the eyesore and noise.

Resident Andrea Lettowsky
tells BR: "For me I keep thinking about how this used to be a beautiful
landscape with open fields, and now it’s an industrial zone."

That’s
pretty much the sentiment that has spread across Germany, and with the
10-H rule Bavaria is leading the way in the country’s growing resistance
to landscape spoilage by inefficient wind power. Already over 300
citizens initiatives have formed to resist the construction of new parks
across the country.

Moreover, recent reports tell us the German
government is poised to scale back on renewable energies, aiming to cap
it at 40 – 45% of total energy supply by 2025, according to the
Berliner Zeitung.

The BR reports that although it is too late for
Obbach, the new 10H rule is welcome and now gives communities the power
to stop wind park projects that are aggressively pushed by
deep-pocketed outside investors. Though it’s regrettable the park could
not be stopped, Lettowsky is optimistic that other projects will be
stopped elsewhere. The BR report concludes:

The fact is that the
10-H rule and the resistance from the citizens have pretty much put the
brakes on further wind park construction in Bavaria."

Indeed, thanks to forward looking states like Bavaria, the renewable energy tide is changing for the better.

Fathom
Events and SpectiCast are giving a major push to the anti-global
warming documentary "Climate Hustle," with plans for showings at nearly
400 theaters on May 2.

Variety has learned exclusively that
former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is
participating in the event. The screening of the documentary, produced
by Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and Marc Morano’s
ClimateDepot.com, will be followed by a panel discussion featuring
Palin, with opening remarks by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of
the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

The
discussion will be moderated by Brent Bozell, founder and president of
the Media Research Center. Morano is planning to show clips of Bill Nye,
best known as "the science guy," from an interview. Variety reported
earlier that Nye was scheduled to appear but his rep for said he was not
invited to participate.

The invitation-only panel discussion will take place Thursday in Washington, D.C., following a screening of "Climate Hustle."

"I’m
very passionate about this issue," Palin told Variety. "We’ve been told
by fearmongers that global warming is due to man’s activities and this
presents strong arguments against that in a very relatable way."

Palin
noted that, while governor in 2008, she sued the U.S. government over
placing the polar bear on the threatened species list because of the
rapid decline in Arctic sea ice. Palin pointed to the high population of
polar bears in 2008 and dismissed climate models that predict continued
loss of sea ice as "unreliable," "uncertain" and "unproven," but a
federal judge backed the government scientists’ finding in 2011.

"I
wanted facts and real numbers," Palin said. "The polar bear population
is stable, if not growing and the designation would have stymied
Alaska’s pursuit of developing its natural resources."

The
"Climate Hustle" presentation by Fathom, which specializes in presenting
live events for theatrical chains, represents a departure from its
usual fare of music and family films.

Among the largest past
presentations for the company, co-owned by AMC Entertainment, Cinemark
Holdings and Regal Entertainment Group: "The Sound of Music 50th
Anniversary" at 800 locations; "Finding Noah: An Adventure of Faith"
screened at 637 sites; "Ed Sheeran: Jumpers for Goalposts" at 584
theaters; and "Chonda Pierce: Laughing in the Dark," a documentary about
Christian comedian, at 512 locations.

Palin said "Climate
Hustle" offers a countering view to Al Gore’s global warming documentary
"An Inconvenient Truth," which grossed nearly $50 million and won
Academy Awards for best documentary feature and original song.

"People
who do not believe in American exceptionalism have made this into a
campaign issue, so it’s vital that the other side be heard," she added.
"I’m very pleased that this is written and spoken in layman’s terms. My
dad taught science to fifth and sixth graders, and it was very important
to him that science be presented in an understandable way."

Marc
Morano, host of "Climate Hustle" said, "This film is truly unique among
climate documentaries. ‘Climate Hustle’ presents viewers with facts and
compelling video footage going back four decades, and delivers a
powerful presentation of dissenting science, best of all, in a humorous
way. This film may change the way you think about ‘global warming.'"

The
film profiles Georgia Tech climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, former NASA
atmospheric scientist Dr. John Theon, and French physicist and Socialist
Party member Claude Allègre.

"Climate change is certainly one of
the hot-button issues at the forefront of some of the fiercest
political debates. This event aims to shed light on varied perspectives
and initiate healthy and timely conversation around this important
topic," said Fathom Events Vice President of Programming Kymberli Frueh.

"‘Climate
Hustle’ is an extremely timely event, especially given the relevant
political discussion surrounding global warming," said Mark Rupp,
co-founder and president of SpectiCast Entertainment. "We feel it is
important to share all viewpoints on the climate change issue and
‘Climate Hustle’ provides a perspective not generally shared with the
public at large in an informative and engaging way."

Morano
founded the anti-climate change website Climatedepot.com in 2009. Media
Matters for America, a politically progressive media watchdog group,
named Morano the "Climate Change Misinformer of the Year" in 2012.

The
average American’s electric bill has gone up 10 percent since January,
2009, due in part to regulations imposed by President Barack Obama and
state governments, even though the price of generating power has
declined.

Record low costs for generating electricity thanks to
America’s new natural gas supplies created by hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, haven’t translated into lower monthly payments for consumers
due to new regulations.

The price of generating electricity in
the eastern U.S. fell by half under Obama, but utilities raised monthly
bills for residential customers, according to government data.

The
biggest price increase in the U.S. was in Kansas, where prices rose
from 8.16 cents per kilowatt-hour in January, 2009, to 11.34 cents in
January, 2015. That’s a 39 percent increase in the price of electricity
during Obama’s tenure. States like Idaho, Nebraska, Wyoming, South
Dakota, Missouri, Utah, and Ohio saw enormous increases in the price of
electricity as well, according to data from the Energy Information
Administration.

States
with large and developed natural gas and oil industries generally saw
their average electric bill drop. The biggest price drop was in Texas,
where prices fell by almost 10 percent during Obama’s tenure. States
like Louisiana, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, Delaware, New Jersey, Maine
and the District of Columbia all saw the average electric bill fall
since January, 2009.

"President Obama openly ran in 2008 on a
platform of making electricity rates ‘skyrocket’ and bankrupting anyone
who dared to build a coal plant in the United States," Travis Fisher, an
economist at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller
News Foundation. "Now, more than seven years into his presidency, it
should come as no surprise that his efforts have taken a widespread toll
in the form of higher electricity rates for nearly every state in the
union."

Despite falling generation costs, electrical utilities
are being forced by the government to pay for billions of dollars of
government-mandated "improvements" and taxpayer support for new wind and
solar power systems.

"The administration has subsidized our
highest-cost sources of electricity–new wind and solar facilities–while
shutting down a significant portion of our most economic source, which
is the existing workhorse fleet of coal-fired power plants," Fisher
continued. "In fact, rates are going up when they should be going down.
For example, natural gas prices reached their peak in 2008 and have
since fallen by two-thirds. Coal prices are stable. What’s really behind
the increase in electricity prices is an increase in subsidized and
mandated wind and solar power combined with a decrease in low-cost
electricity from coal."

Most analysts agree rising residential
electricity prices are also harmful to American households. Pricey power
disproportionately hurts poorer families and other lower-income groups
as the poor tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes on "basic
needs" like power, so any increase in prices hits them the hardest.

As
essential goods like electricity becomes more expensive, the cost of
producing goods and services that use electricity increases, effectively
raising the price of almost everything. The higher prices are
ultimately paid for by consumers, not industries.

The
Northern Territory government says the new regulations it's developing
for mining will be more transparent and put the onus on companies to
prove they're doing all they can to minimise any risks from fracking.

But environmental groups say companies can't be trusted to do that unless there's something in it for them.

The
Senate Select Committee on Unconventional Gas Mining is sitting in
Darwin on Tuesday, following previous hearings in Queensland and NSW.

Shale
gas fracking is a big issue for the NT as it heads to an election in
August, with Labor promising a moratorium if it wins, which has caused
uncertainty in the local industry and raised concerns that it will cost
more jobs.

There has been a groundswell of anti-fracking
sentiment across the NT even as the current Country Liberals government
talks up the economic benefits.

It says the science is in, and that there have been no reported instances of fracking in the NT causing any water contamination.

A
report it commissioned in 2014 found there was no need for a moratorium
if there was proper regulation in place, and the government is
developing a new regulatory framework which it says will require
companies to go above and beyond to minimise any potential risks, rather
than meeting a prescribed minimum standard which may not adequately
forsee all potential risks on every project.

"Built into this is
significantly more transparency and stakeholder engagement through that
approvals process than has ever been present before, so that everyone
does have, we believe, a greater level of transparency and therefore
hopefully confidence in the processes we're implementing," said Ron
Kelly, CEO of the NT Department of Mines and Energy.

But all
scientific reports on the practice say the industry is only safe if a
robust regulatory regime is in place "and we're not there yet", said
David Morris, principal lawyer with the Environmental Defenders Office
NT.

Until that is developed, he supports a moratorium, he said.

"The
other thing I have significant concerns about is the capacity of the
regulator in an environment where we have a huge amount of onus placed
on the operator to do the right thing," Mr Morris said.

"I'm not
sure that history tells us we should have a great deal of confidence in
oil and gas operators doing the right thing, unless they're required to
or they see an incentive in doing so."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

12 April, 2016

The latest temperature data from Switzerland

It's
got hotter in Switzerland. From the early C20 to the early C21 it
warmed more than twice as much as the rest of the world. An
average implies a range so that is not particularly surprising and the
authors do not venture an explanation. So all we have is a warning
not to generalize from Swiss data. The Warmists undoubtedly will,
though

Changes
in intensity and frequency of daily heavy precipitation and hot
temperature extremes are analyzed in Swiss observations for the years
1901–2014/2015. A spatial pooling of temperature and precipitation
stations is applied to analyze the emergence of trends.

Over 90%
of the series show increases in heavy precipitation intensity,
expressed as annual maximum daily precipitation (mean change: +10.4% 100
years 31% significant, p < 0.05) and in heavy precipitation
frequency, expressed as the number of events greater than the 99th
percentile of daily precipitation (mean change: +26.5% 100 years 35%
significant, p< 0.05).

The intensity of heavy precipitation
increases on average by 7.7% K 1 smoothed Swiss annual mean temperature,
a value close to the Clausius-Clapeyron scaling. The hottest day and
week of the year have warmed by 1.6 K to 2.3 K depending on the region,
while the Swiss annual mean temperature increased by 1.9 K.

The
frequency of very hot days exceeding the 99th percentile of daily
maximum temperature has more than tripled. Despite considerable
local internal variability, increasing trends in heavy precipitation and
hot temperature extremes are now found at most Swiss stations. The
identified trends are unlikely to be random and are consistent with
climate model projections, with theoretical understanding of a
human-induced change in the energy budget and water cycle and with
detection and attribution studies of extremes on larger scales.

Data from China: Climate cycles correlate with solar output and ocean currents only

Tree-ring-width-based PDSI reconstruction for central Inner Mongolia, China over the past 333 years

Yu Liu et al.

Abstract

A
tree-ring-width chronology was developed from Pinus tabulaeformis aged
up to 333 years from central Inner Mongolia, China. The chronology was
significantly correlated with the local Palmer Drought Severity Index
(PDSI). We therefore reconstructed the first PDSI reconstruction from
March to June based on the local tree ring data from 1680 to 2012 AD.
The reconstruction explained 40.7 % of the variance (39.7 % after
adjusted the degrees of freedom) of the actual PDSI during the
calibration period (1951–2012 AD). The reconstructed PDSI series
captured the severe drought event of the late 1920s, which occurred
extensively in northern China. Running variance analyses indicated that
the variability of drought increased sharply after 1960, indicating more
drought years, which may imply anthropogenic related global warming
effects in the region. In the entire reconstruction, there were five dry
periods: 1730–1814 AD, 1849–1869 AD, 1886–1942 AD (including severe
drought in late 1920s), 1963–1978 AD and 2004–2007 AD; and five wet
periods: 1685–1729 AD, 1815–1848 AD, 1870–1885 AD, 1943–1962 AD and
1979–2003 AD. Conditions turned dry after 2003 AD, and the PDSI from
March to June (PDSI36) captured many interannual extreme drought events
since then, such as 2005–2008 AD. The reconstruction is comparable to
other tree-ring-width-based PDSI series from the neighboring regions,
indicating that our reconstruction has good regional representativeness.
Significant relationships were found between our PDSI reconstruction
and the solar radiation cycle and the sun spot cycle, North Atlantic
Oscillation, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, as well as the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation. Power spectral analyses detected 147.0-, 128.2-,
46.5-, 6.5-, 6.3-, 2.6-, 2.2- and 2.0-year quasi-cycles in the
reconstructed series.

RICK
MORAN below mentions some large holes in this latest attempted-scare
but could also have mentioned the high birthrates among many human
groups in the tropics

Is there anything global warming can't
do? It's absolutely amazing the impact on our planet global warming will
have just because the temperature rises a few degrees.

The
latest on the catastrophe that will befall us comes from a befuddled
academic who claims that warming temperatures will make us less inclined
to have sex, thus reducing the number of births in the U.S. by more
than 100,000 a year.

ABC Australia:

"Temperature impacts
the sexual patterns of human beings for two reasons, according to
Professor Barreca. One reason he gave was that human beings did not want
to exert themselves physically in hot weather, due to possible
discomfort"

The second reason was more scientific.

"The
effect of temperature on the production of sperm — that's been shown to
be pretty strong in animals," Professor Barreca said.

"When you expose a bull to high temperatures, sperm motility and sperm count fall right off."

He said with the onset of climate change and global warming, the implications could grow.

"According
to a state of the art global circulation model, there is going to be
about 90 hot days per year by the end of the 21st century — that's about
60 more days than we currently experience," he said.

"Using our
estimates, we project that the number of births will fall by about
107,000 per year in the United States by the end of the 21st century."

He
said this implied climate could have an impact on the seasonal
variation of births, and ultimately change when we have to attend the
most birthday parties.

I guess the good doctor never heard of air conditioning.

Are
we doomed to a sexless future where "Not tonight, darling. I have a
headache" is replaced with "Get your hands off me. It's too hot"?

No
matter. I challenge the notion that hot weather deters people from
having sex. An ice cube on warm skin can be very erotic. And it's clear
our researcher has never done much with ice cream in the boudoir.

I can mention a few more creative ways to enjoy the heat during coitus but this is a family website and I'm already turning red.

I
suppose if the scientists have it wrong and we're going to go through a
long period of global cooling, we should get ready for another baby
boom while stocking up on oysters and arugula to keep the fires of
passion burning brightly.

(David R. Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware)

By
now, virtually everyone has heard that "97% of scientists agree:
Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous." Even if you weren’t one
of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President
Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific
fact.

The correct representation is "yes," "some," and "no."
Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s
history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or
another.

People can and do have some influence on our climate.
For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside,
and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But
humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The
Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout
history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

As
for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little
fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe
were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today.
Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them.
An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous;
but actual weather records do not show this.

It would be far
more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn
billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower
living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control
the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen
50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper
wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.

Moreover,
consensus and votes have no place in science. History is littered with
theories that were long denied by "consensus" science and politics:
plate tectonics, germ theory of disease, a geocentric universe. They all
underscore how wrong consensus can be.

Science is driven by
facts, evidence and observations – not by consensus, especially when it
is asserted by deceitful or tyrannical advocates. As Einstein said, "A
single experiment can prove me wrong."

During this election
season, Americans are buffeted by polls suggesting which candidate might
become each party’s nominee or win the general election. Obviously,
only the November "poll" counts.

Similarly, several "polls" have
attempted to quantify the supposed climate change consensus, often by
using simplistic bait-and-switch tactics. "Do you believe in climate
change?" they may ask.

Answering yes, as I would, places you in
the President’s 97% consensus and, by illogical extension, implies you
agree it is caused by humans and will be dangerous. Of course, that
serves their political goal of gaining more control over energy use.

The
97% statistic has specific origins. Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard
professor and author of Merchants of Doubt, which claims those who
disagree with the supposed consensus are paid by Big Oil to obscure the
truth. In 2004, she claimed to have examined the abstracts of 928
scientific papers and found a 100% consensus with the claim that the
"Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities."

Of
course, this is probably true, as it is unlikely that any competent
scientist would say humans have no impact on climate. However, she then
played the bait-and-switch game to perfection – asserting that this
meant "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to
have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

However,
one dissenter is enough to discredit the entire study, and what
journalist would believe any claim of 100% agreement? In addition,
anecdotal evidence suggested that 97% was a better figure. So 97% it
was.

Then in 2010, William Anderegg and colleagues concluded that
"97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the
field support … [the view that] … anthropogenic greenhouse gases have
been responsible for most of the unequivocal warming of the Earth’s
average global temperature" over a recent but unspecified time period.
(Emphasis in original.)

To make this extreme assertion, Anderegg
et al. compiled a database of 908 climate researchers who published
frequently on climate topics, and identified those who had "signed
statements strongly dissenting from the views" of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 97–98% figure is achieved
by counting those who had not signed such statements.

Silence,
in Anderegg’s view, meant those scientists agreed with the extreme view
that most warming was due to humans. However, nothing in their papers
suggests that all those researchers believed humans had caused most of
the planetary warming, or that it was dangerous.

The most recent
97% claim was posited by John Cook and colleagues in 2013. They
evaluated abstracts from nearly 12,000 articles published over a 21-year
period and sorted them into seven categories, ranging from "explicit,
quantified endorsement" to "explicit, quantified rejection" of their
alleged consensus: that recent warming was caused by human activity, not
by natural variability. They concluded that "97.1% endorsed the
consensus position."

However, two-thirds of all those abstracts
took no position on anthropogenic climate change. Of the remaining
abstracts (not the papers or scientists), Cook and colleagues asserted
that 97.1% endorsed their hypothesis that humans are the sole cause of
recent global warming.

Again, the bait-and-switch was on full
display. Any assertion that humans play a role was interpreted as
meaning humans are the sole cause. But many of those scientists
subsequently said publicly that Cook and colleagues had misclassified
their papers – and Cook never tried to assess whether any of the
scientists who wrote the papers actually thought the observed climate
changes were dangerous.

My own colleagues and I did investigate
their analysis more closely. We found that only 41 abstracts of the
11,944 papers Cook and colleagues reviewed – a whopping 0.3% – actually
endorsed their supposed consensus. It turns out they had decided that
any paper which did not provide an explicit, quantified rejection of
their supposed consensus was in agreement with the consensus. Moreover,
this decision was based solely on Cook and colleagues’ interpretation of
just the abstracts, and not the articles themselves. In other
words, the entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick.

What
is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the
supposed consensus – that climate change is manmade and dangerous –
find themselves under constant attack.

Harassment by Greenpeace
and other environmental pressure groups, the media, federal and state
government officials, and even universities toward their employees
(myself included) makes it difficult for many scientists to express
honest opinions. Recent reports about Senator Whitehouse and
Attorney-General Lynch using RICO laws to intimidate climate "deniers"
further obscure meaningful discussion.

Numerous government
employees have told me privately that they do not agree with the
supposed consensus position – but cannot speak out for fear of losing
their jobs. And just last week, a George Mason University survey found
that nearly one-third of American Meteorological Society members were
willing to admit that at least half of the climate change we have seen
can be attributed to natural variability.

Climate change alarmism
has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year industry – which guarantees it is far
safer and more fashionable to pretend a 97% consensus exists, than to
embrace honesty and have one’s global warming or renewable energy
funding go dry.

The real danger is not climate change – it is
energy policies imposed in the name of climate change. It’s time to
consider something else Einstein said: "The important thing is not to
stop questioning." And then go see the important new documentary film,
The Climate Hustle, coming soon to a theater near you.

So
vulnerable, flawed, and under fire has climate science and other fields
become that the only tactic left to defend the disintegrating positions
is to use Stalinist measures to suppress dissident views, and even
sicking state attorney generals on anyone expressing legitimate doubt –
science truth by state legal decree.

Meanwhile in Europe
dissident views in a variety of fields, especially climate science, are
being suppressed by a power-abusive establishment. Sebastian Lüning and
Fritz Vahrenholt report:

"In Weltwoche of 6 April 2016 Prof.
Mathias Binswanger was very clear on why young university researchers
are quasi forced to submit themselves to the trends of the day, i.e. the
overriding mainstream in any particular scientific field:

Mathias
Binswanger: ‘The principle is ultimately always the same: Foremost one
has to be an often published and often cited figure in his/her
scientific field in order to be able to contribute to the ranking of a
university. But how does one often publish or become often cited in
respected journals of his own field? The most important principles are:
Adaptation to the mainstream and do not question any established
theories or models.

All submitted articles first must go through
a peer-review process where champions of the scientific discipline
evaluate it. Under these circumstances a young researcher has no option
but to go along with the mainstream theories represented in the top
journals and to use the empirical processes that are currently in trend.
Only in this way does he/she have any chance of having enough
publications to make him/herself eligible to be a professor. Through
this very kind of pressure to conform applied by top journals is science
obstructed rather than promoted.'"

It is hardly necessary to
mention that this principle promotes a "Stalinist conformity" with the
highly politicized climate sciences for young researchers. typically
today mostly only retired professors dare to speak up when it comes to
doubt over the supposed imminent climate catastrophe. These professors
finally beco0me free to openly express themselves without threats to
their careers threatened.

Rooftop solar companies will only play if the game is stacked in their favor

By Marita Noon

The
past couple of weeks have highlighted the folly of the energy policies
favored by left-leaning advocacy agencies that, rather than allowing
consumers and markets to choose, require government mandates and
subsidies. Three major, but very different, solar entities — that would
not exist without such political preference — are now facing
demise. Even with the benefit of tax credits, low-interest loans,
and cash grants that state and federal governments have bestowed on
them, the solar industry is struggling.

We’ve seen Abengoa — which I’ve followed for years — file for bankruptcy.

Ivanpah,
the world’s biggest solar power tower project in the California desert,
is threatened with closure due to underperformance.

Then there
is SunEdison, the biggest renewable energy developer in the world. It’s
on the verge of bankruptcy as its stock price plunged from more than $30
to below $.50 — a more than 90 percent drop in the past year.

All
of these recent failures magnify the solar industry’s black eye that
first swelled up nearly five years ago with the Solyndra bankruptcy.

Worried
about self-preservation, and acting in its own best interest — rather
than that of consumers specifically, and America in general — industry
groups have sprung up to defend the favored-status energy policies and
attack anyone who disagrees with the incentive-payment business model.
Two such groups are TASC and TUSK — both of which are founded and funded
by solar panel powerhouses SolarCity and SunRun with involvement from
smaller solar companies (SolarCity recently parted ways with TASC).

The
Alliance for Solar Choice (TASC) is run by the lead lobbyists for the
two big companies — both have obvious Democrat Party connections.

Bryan
Miller is Senior Vice President, Public Policy & Power Markets at
Sunrun (a position he took in January 2013) and is President and
co-chair of TASC (May 2013). His LinkedIn page shows that he’s worked
for the National Finance Committee for Obama for America and was Finance
Coordinator/Field Organizer for Clinton Gore ’96. He’s also served as s
senior political appointee in the Obama Administration and ran an
unsuccessful 2008 bid for election to Florida’s House of
Representatives, District 83.

Co-chair John Stanton is Executive
Vice President, Policy & Markets at SolarCity. In that role, he,
according to the company website, "oversees SolarCity’s work with
international, federal, state and local government organizations on a
wide range of policy issues." Previously, Stanton was Executive Vice
President and General Counsel for the Solar Energy Industries
Association (SEIA)—the national trade association for industries that
support the development of solar power—with which he oversaw legal and
government affairs for the association. There he played a pivotal role
in the 8-year extension of the solar investment tax credit. He was also
legislative counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency under the
Clinton administration.

A news report about the founding of TASC
states: "First and foremost, the group will work to protect net-energy
metering (NEM) rules in the 43 states that have them."

On March
25, the Wall Street Journal reported: "two dozen states are weighing
changes to their incentives for rooftop solar…incentive payments have
been the backbone of home solar firms’ business model." In the past
several months, Nevada and Hawaii have ended their NEM programs. TASC
has responded with lawsuits. In Hawaii, TASC’s case has already been
dismissed with a report stating: the judge’s "ruling in favor of the
Defendants has eviscerated TASC’s claims." Last year, Louisiana capped
its "among the most generous in the country" solar tax credit. Arizona
Public Service was the trailblazer in modifying generous solar policies
when, in 2013, the Arizona Corporation Commission approved a fixed
charge for solar customers.

As one of the first states to
challenge the generous NEM policies, Arizona is still a battleground.
That’s where TASC formed another group: TUSK — which stands for Tell
Utilities Solar won’t be Killed. Lobbyist and former U.S. Congressman
Barry Goldwater, Jr. was brought in to give a Republican face to the
industry’s advocacy. TUSK even has an elephant, the Republican mascot,
as part of its logo. The TUSK home page states: "Republicans want the
freedom to make the best choice and the competition to drive down rates"
— true, but a core value of the Republican Party is allowing the free
markets to work rather than governments picking winners and losers.

While registered in Arizona, TUSK has recently been active in other states — including Nevada, Oklahoma, and Michigan.

The
reoccurring theme in the TASC/TUSK campaign is to connect the word
"kill" with "solar" — though the NEM modification efforts don’t intend
to kill solar. Instead, they aim to adjust the "incentive payments" to
make them more equitable. However, without the favors, as was seen in
Nevada, rooftop solar isn’t economical on its own. Companies refuse to
play when the game is not stacked in their favor.

TASC and TUSK
are just two of the ways the rooftop solar industry — also known as a
"coalition of rent seekers and welfare queens," as Louisiana’s largest
conservative blog, The Hayride, called them in the midst of that state’s
solar wars — is trying to protect its preferential policies. It has
other tricks in its playbook.

In addition to the specific
industry groups like TASC, TUSK and SEIA, third party organizations like
the Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) are engaged to intimidate public
officials and academics. EPI, run by Gabe Elsner, is considered a dark
money group with no legal existence. It can be assumed to be an
extension of what is known as the Checks & Balances Project
(CB&P)—which was founded to investigate organizations and
policymakers that do not support government programs and subsidies for
renewable energy. CB&P has received funding from SolarCity. Elsner
joined CB&P in 2011 — where he served as Director — and then, two
years later, left to found EPI — which C&BP calls: "a pro-clean
energy website." EPI produces material to attack established energy
interests and discredit anyone who doesn’t support rooftop solar
subsidies. I have been a target of Elsner’s efforts.

Then there
is the Solar Foundation — closely allied with SEIA and government solar
advocacy programs — which publishes a yearly report on solar employment
trends across the country. Solar employers self-report the jobs numbers
via phone/email surveys and the numbers are, then, extrapolated to
estimate industry jobs nationwide. Though the reports achieve
questionable results, threats of job loss have proven to be an effective
way to pressure state and federal lawmakers to continue the industry’s
favorable policies — such as NEM.

Together, these groups have a
coordinated campaign to produce public opinion polling that is used to
convince politicians of NEM’s public support. Such cases can be found in
Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Kansas. They gather
signatures from solar advocates and use them to influence legislators
and commissioners. They engage in regulatory and rate proceedings —
often creating, as I’ve experienced, an overwhelming presence with
mob-like support from tee-shirt-wearing, sign-waving advocates. They run
ads calling attempts to modify solar’s generous NEM policies a "tax" on
solar and, as previously mentioned, attack utilities for trying to
"kill solar." If this combined campaign isn’t fruitful, and NEM policies
are changed, lawsuits, such as those in Hawaii and Nevada, are filed.

This
policy protection process may seem no different from those engaged by
any industry — as most have trade associations and advocacy groups that
promote their cause. Remember "Beef, it’s what’s for dinner" and "Pork,
the other white meat"? Few are truly independent and self-preservation
is a natural instinct.

Yes, even the fossil fuel industry has,
for example, the American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum
Association of America, the National Mining Association, and the
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. And there are advocacy
groups who support various limited-government, free-market positions, as
Miller recently accused.

The difference is that fossil fuels
provide, and has been providing, America with efficient, effective, and
economical energy. Its abundance has lowered costs for consumers and
increased America’s energy security. Advocates are not fighting for
special favors that allow this natural resource to survive, but are
rather attempting to push back on new rules and regulations aimed at
driving it out of business.

By comparison, the solar advocacy
efforts are, as acknowledged by TASC: "First and foremost, the group
will work to protect net-energy metering (NEM) rules," as without them —
and the other politically correct policies — rooftop solar energy
doesn’t make economic sense. Because rooftop solar power isn’t efficient
or effective, its major selling point is supposed savings that are
achieved for a few, while costing all tax- and rate-payers.

With
the potential of a change in political winds — remember the solar
supporters all seem to be left-leaning, big government believers who
want higher energy prices — the campaign for America’s energy future is
embedded in the presidential election.

Will big government pick
the winners and losers, or will free markets allow the survival of the
best energy sources for individual circumstances?

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

11 April, 2016

Uncovering the Corporate Influence Over Climate Change

An
excerpt from a very elaborate "report" below. It depends entirely
on content analysis, a notoriously shaky procedure. They collect
documents issued by an organization and categorize them in terms
of whether the documents support or oppose the global warming
religion. But given past absurd content analyses from Warmists
such as Naomi Oreskes and John Cook, we have to expect vast
mis-categorization this time around too.

Even if done
honestly, content analysis is very difficult. I did a small bit of
content analysis during my research career so I know where the
skeletons are buried. How for instance would they rate a statement
that: "there is some warming going on but we need more data to
decide how dangerous it is". My guess is that the galoots below
would categorize that as anti-warmist even though it admits that warming
is going on. And that is just the first difficulty:
Deciding what goes into each category. And then there is the
problem of inter-rater reliability, rater objectivity and so on.

And
the galoots below say openly that some organizations undermine the
Warmist message in "ever-subtle ways" so they are obviously very
inclusive in what they count as anti-Warmist. Just a hint of being
anti-Warmist is apparently enough for you to be consigned to the
naughty bin. The whole thing is prettily presented rubbish

Corporate
influence over the climate change debate and policy process has at many
levels been cited as a key reason for the relatively slow progress of
both the UN COP process and national-level climate legislation. We have
forensically evaluated the 100 leading, publicly traded companies along
with 30 trade associations and have scored them according to the extent
to which they are exerting this influence.

Our full ranking is now publicly available online. Below are some findings and analysis of what our scoring means for business.

More than lobbying

We
use the term "influence" rather than lobbying for good reason. The
capture of climate change policy by corporations extends beyond formal
and financial interactions between lawmakers and corporations and their
representatives. Since the 1990s corporations have invested heavily in
messaging (advertising, PR, social media, etc.) to ensure their views on
climate science and the appropriate policy response are heard loudly at
multiple levels. Corporations try to ensure they are continuously
engaging at all levels of the policy making process - from providing
engineering expertise on matters technical, to CEO phone-calls to
political leaders at key policy moments. All of these activities
constitute corporate influence and we attempt to objectively assess as
much as possible in our analysis.

Trade associations at the center

The
role of trade associations and other influencers in controlling climate
policy has been studied, by among others our collaborators USC in the
US and our advisor Ben Fagan-Watson in the EU. The same rigorous method
InfluenceMap uses on the analysis of corporations is applied to the
leading trade associations they are affiliated with. In the US, the
lowest scoring influencers in our system are ALEC and the American
Petroleum Institute, closely followed by NAM and the US Chamber of
Commerce. In Europe, powerful trade federation BusinessEurope and
industry-specific trade groups CEFIC (chemicals) and ACEA (automotive)
score poorly. Japan's powerful Keidanren openly opposes most climate
regulations, suggesting industry can lead the way on its own terms. All
of these organizations, and more, have consistently undermined climate
regulations over the last decade in ever-subtle ways, increasingly
arguing for a global treaty that maintains competitiveness while
obstructing many of the key regulatory details needed to enforce it. Our
system also assesses corporate links to these associations that results
in a relationship score for each company along side its own score. In
most cases these relationships greatly reduce the final performance band
the corporation ends up in, in the system.

And the weather was so non-spring-like that when Al flew from New York to Harvard where he gave a sustainability talk, the flight was cancelled and he had to drive to Harvard

The Left’s Climate Inquisition’s New Target

Hans von Spakovsky

In
a truly outrageous abuse of his authority and a misuse of the law, the
attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Claude E. Walker, has
served a subpoena on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
demanding documents related to CEI’s research on global "climate
change." Walker is part of a network of state "AGs United for Clean
Power" who have formed a grand inquisition to go after those they claim
have lied about climate change—which is a contentious and unproven
scientific theory.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a
non-profit public policy institute (like the Heritage Foundation) that
researches and publishes studies and reports on issues it believes are
"essential for entrepreneurship, innovation, and prosperity to
flourish." It is dedicated to the principles of "limited government,
free enterprise, and individual liberty." CEI is well-known for its
high-quality, objective research on energy and climate issues, which
clearly has made it a target of Inquisitor Walker.

Although
Walker’s jurisdiction does not extend outside the Virgin Islands (a U.S.
territory), he had a subpoena issued through the Superior Court of the
District of Columbia, where CEI is located.

The voluminous,
harassing 14-page subpoena says Inquisitor Walker is investigating
ExxonMobil for "misrepresenting its knowledge of the likelihood that its
products and activities have contributed to and are continuing to
contribute to climate change in order to defraud the Government … and
consumers." This supposedly violates the Criminally Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations Act, which is the Virgin Islands’ version of the
federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO.

The
subpoena demands that CEI turn over all documents, communications,
statements, emails, op-eds, speeches, advertisements, letters to the
editor, research, reports, studies, and memoranda of any kind—including
drafts—that refer to climate change, greenhouse gases, carbon tax,
climate science, and the like, in any way related to ExxonMobil or the
"products sold by or activities carried out by ExxonMobil [that]
directly or indirectly impact climate change." It covers the period
between January 1, 1997, and January 1, 2007. And Walker wants donor
information, too.

There are so many things wrong with this that
it is hard to know where to start. First of all, the basis for the
investigation is absurd. Walker is using a criminal statute designed to
go after major drug dealers and mob organizations to go after a company
that produces the gasoline and diesel fuel that Americans (and the rest
of the world) use in their cars, trucks, boats, lawnmowers, and other
equipment of every kind. And ExxonMobil and CEI are being targeted for
having taken what these legal barons consider the wrong side of a
scientific theory that is being actively debated and questioned.

The
fact that ExxonMobil produces a relatively cheap, reliable energy
source that helps power our world but is disfavored by Progressives and
their political representatives like Walker seems to be what the company
is really guilty of.

The root of what is going on here appears
to be an effort to intimidate, harass, frighten, and possibly imprison
or fine anyone who Walker and his fellow warders think is saying the
wrong thing and who is standing in the way when it comes to forcing the
rest of us to switch to politically correct and unreliable energy
sources like wind and solar.

This investigation is intended to
silence and chill any opposition. It is disgraceful and contemptible
behavior by public officials.

This investigation is intended to
silence and chill any opposition. It is disgraceful and contemptible
behavior by public officials who are willing to exploit their power to
achieve ideological ends. As CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman says, "it is
an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and
association."

Given the coalition that has been formed by state
attorneys general to conduct a grand inquisition against climate change
deniers, this subpoena from the Virgin Islands attorney general is
probably just the first assault in their quasi-religious war against
unbelievers. Researchers, scientists, think tanks, universities, and
anyone else who works or speaks in this area should be aware that they
may soon become a target of these malicious investigations.

Fortunately, CEI has already announced that it intends to resist and "will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena."

That
is important, because if Walker and his "Axis" alliance succeed, "the
real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy
will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and
policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time," according to
Kazman.

CEI will be defended by the Free Speech in Science
Project, which was founded by Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin Jr.
to defend "scientists, writers, businesses and others targeted for
speaking out on scientific issues and policy."

As they point out,
the public needs to understand how actions like this threaten "our
precious First Amendment rights," as well as "deliberative democracy,
when scientists, think tanks, and private businesses are persecuted for
their views."

Make no mistake about it. What is happening to
ExxonMobil and to the Competitive Enterprise Institute is persecution.
It is an affront to our grand tradition of free speech and vigorous
scientific debate and should not be tolerated.

Donors Decline to Back More Fracking Research After Study Finds No Link to Water Contamination

The
lead researcher in a study that concluded that fracking in Ohio didn’t
contaminate groundwater told The Daily Signal that, contrary to her
previous remarks, donors to the study did not pull funding because of
"specific disappointment" with those results.

Amy Townsend-Small,
an assistant professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati who
conducted the three-year study, did acknowledge that some financial
backers "have declined to continue funding past the initial study
period."

However, Townsend-Small said in an email Monday
to The Daily Signal, those decisions not to donate more might be because
the study didn’t establish a relationship between hydraulic fracturing,
or fracking, and water contamination in Carroll County and other areas
that include the Utica Shale deposit.

Townsend-Small also said
the results "show that fracking does not always lead to groundwater
contamination, but that continuous monitoring is needed to ensure
contamination has not occurred."

"The left likes to continually
talk about settled science, but often it’s settled on a predetermined
outcome," Nick Loris, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who
studies energy issues, told The Daily Signal. "Politicians use that
predetermined outcome to justify policies that drive up the costs of
affordable, reliable energy—even though those policies have little to no
environmental benefit."

‘Fracking Is Scary’

The Daily
Signal sought comment from the Deer Creek Foundation on why it decided
to stop funding the fracking study in Ohio, but its executive director
did not respond.

The major goal of the study by the University of
Cincinnati’s geology department was to measure the presence of methane
(CH4) in groundwater prior to the onset of fracking, and to compare the
results to methane measured during and after the process.

In
fracking, engineers inject water mixed with sand and chemicals into a
well at high pressure, producing a fluid that fractures the rock and
releases previously trapped oil and natural gas.

The energy
industry has used the fracking technique for several decades. What’s new
is the use of hydraulic fracturing together with precision directional
drilling, enabling wells to be drilled horizontally right through the
oil or natural gas rock itself.

The initial results of the
university’s study were released Feb. 4 on the Carroll Concerned
Citizens website during a regular meeting of the group, which seeks to
inform residents about the long-term health and economic effects of
mineral extraction.

Townsend-Small, the lead researcher, discussed key findings during this meeting. Her presentation may be seen on YouTube.

"I
am really sad to say this, but some of our funders, the groups that had
given us funding in the past, were a little disappointed in our
results," Townsend-Small was quoted as saying. "They feel that fracking
is scary, and so they were hoping this data could be a reason to ban
it."

‘We Did Not Find Any Changes’

The geologic research
team concentrated its groundwater measurements in a rural farming area
of Carroll County because that county has the largest number of
hydraulic fracturing permits in Ohio.

The team also measured
groundwater in the state’s Belmont, Columbiana, Harrison, and
Stark Counties, but less frequently than in Carroll. The study occurred
in tandem with a sharp increase in the number of active gas wells in
Carroll, from three in late 2011 to 354 in 2015.

"We measured
dissolved salt, pH, methane concentration, and methane isotopic
composition in groundwater over several years in the Utica Shale
fracking region of Ohio," Townsend-Small said in the email to The Daily
Signal, adding:

These measurements can indicate whether fracking
fluid or natural gas was introduced into groundwater over the study
period. We did not find any changes in any of these measured
constituents over the study period, in which the number of fracking
sites in the region increased dramatically. This does not mean
that contamination did not happen in other parts of the region or has
occurred after our study ended, but it does indicate that fracking can
take place without contaminating water resources, as has happened in
other regions.

We measured about 25 groundwater wells[.] … We
found no relationship between CH4 [methane] concentration in groundwater
and proximity to active gas well sites, and no significant change in
CH4 concentration or isotopic composition, pH, or conductivity in water
wells during the study period. We also did not find evidence for
natural gas in water wells, although we did have several study sites
with CH4 concentrations in the dangerous range, but the CH4 in these
wells was from coal beds, not natural gas.

Private donors to the three-year study included the Deer Creek Foundation and the David and Sara Weston Fund.

But
taxpayers also covered some costs in the form of a $85,714 grant from
the Ohio Board of Regents and federal funding from the National Science
Foundation, which news reports said went toward an isotope ratio mass
spectrometer.

State Rep. Andy Thompson, a Republican who
represents a district that includes Carroll County, has called for the
university’s study to be more widely circulated because it received
taxpayer support.

‘They Declined to Renew Funding’

On the
question of continued funding, Townsend-Small sought to modify her
reported remarks that some donors were "disappointed" in the results
because they hoped the findings would support a ban of fracking, which
they consider "scary."

She told The Daily Signal in her email:

Just
to clarify, none of our funders have expressed specific disappointment
in our work, but some have declined to continue our funding past the
initial study period. The study is not being suppressed, as has been
published elsewhere. A preliminary version of our report is
available through my website at UC and the website of our community
partner, Carroll Concerned Citizens.

Our study was funded by the
Deer Creek Foundation and the David and Sara Weston Fund. The Weston
group is continuing to fund our project at a small level. The Deer Creek
Foundation never expressed specific disappointment about our
findings. They just declined to renew our funding and I assumed it
was due to a lack of excitement about our results.

While the
University of Cincinnati study did not find a connection between
fracking and groundwater quality, Townsend-Small told The Daily Signal,
this was not necessarily a hard and fast rule:

Other groups we
have pursued funding from have expressed some confusion about why
monitoring was needed if our initial results indicated a lack of
contamination. It’s important to note that our results do not discredit
previous studies that have linked fracking and groundwater
contamination; rather, we show that fracking does not always lead to
groundwater contamination, but that continuous monitoring is needed to
ensure contamination has not occurred.

Radical green and government agitators slam methane in latest bid to terminate fossil fuel use

Paul Driessen

Quick: What is 17 cents out of $100,000? If you said 0.00017 percent, you win the jackpot.

That
number, by sheer coincidence, is also the percentage of methane in
Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a trivial amount, you say: 1.7 parts per
million. There’s three times more helium and 230 times more carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. You’re absolutely right, again.

Equally
relevant, only 19% of that global methane comes from oil, natural gas
and coal production and use. Fully 33% comes from agriculture: 12% from
rice growing and 21% from meat production. Still more comes from
landfills and sewage treatment (11%) and burning wood and animal dung
(8%). The remaining 29% comes from natural sources: oceans, wetlands,
termites, forest fires and volcanoes.

The manmade portions are
different for the USA: 39% energy use, 36% livestock, 18% landfills, and
8% sewage treatment and other sources. But it’s still a piddling
contribution to a trivial amount in the air.

Of course, the Obama
EPA and Climate Cataclysm Industry ignore these inconvenient facts.
They insist that methane is "a far more potent greenhouse gas" than
carbon dioxide, and that its emissions must be drastically reduced if we
are to avoid "runaway global warming." So EPA and other federal
agencies are preparing to unleash a tsunami of new regulations to block
natural gas drilling, fracking, flaring and production, while radical
environmentalists orchestrate new assaults on petrochemical plants that
create plastics, paints, fabrics, computer and vehicle components and
countless other products for modern life.

They want us to believe
that government regulators can decree Earth’s climate simply by
controlling methane and carbon dioxide – regardless of what the sun,
ocean circulation, recurrent planetary temperature cycles and other
powerful natural forces might do. They say it’s pure coincidence that
these two trace gases (CH4 and CO2) are the only climate-affecting
mechanisms that are associated with the fossil fuels and industrialized
economies they despise.

They also want us to believe reducing
United States methane emissions will make a huge difference. But even if
US manmade methane emissions are 20% of the worldwide total, the 39% US
fossil fuel portion of that US portion means even totally eliminating
US methane emissions would reduce global manmade methane output by a
minuscule 7.8 percent. Under a best-case scenario, that might keep
atmospheric methane below a still irrelevant 0.00020% (2.0 ppm; 20 cents
out of $100,000) for a few more years.

This smells like fraud.
And as New York AG Eric Schneiderman so kindly reminded the climate
skeptics he’s threatening with RICO, "The First Amendment does not give
anyone the right to commit fraud."

Perhaps EPA plans to go after
America’s agricultural sector next. After all, as former UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan intoned last year, red meat is bad for us (cancer)
and for the climate (animal flatulence and manure). Moreover, "insects
have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat," there are 1,900
species of edible insects on Planet Earth, and more than a billion
people already make bugs part of their diet. Perhaps the IPCC and White
House will serve roasted roaches at their next state dinners?

That would reduce US methane emissions a bit more. But it gets even more deceitful, more barking mad.

The
un-ratified 2015 Paris climate treaty obligates the United States,
Australia, Canada and Europe to continue reducing their fossil fuel use
and emissions – even though they can hardly afford to kill more millions
of jobs and further roll back living standards for all but their ruling
elites.

Meanwhile, developing countries will not and cannot
afford to lock up their fossil fuels, shut down their economic growth,
and leave billions of people mired in poverty, malnutrition and disease.
Indeed, under the Paris treaty, they are not required to reduce their
fossil fuel use or "greenhouse gas" emissions; they need only take
voluntary steps to reduce them, when it is convenient for them to do so.

That
means slashing US methane (and carbon dioxide) emissions – and the
jobs, living standards, health and welfare that fossil fuels bring –
will have no effect whatsoever on atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.

But
that is irrelevant to Mr. Obama and his EPA. The fact is, this methane
mendacity and madness has nothing to do with stabilizing Earth’s
climate. It has everything to do with hogtying and bankrupting US fossil
fuel companies, controlling industrial activities and people’s living
standards – and mandating a costly transition to renewable energy, while
rewarding the hordes of scientists, activists and industrialists who
benefit from the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Crisis, Inc. money
train.

That raises a critical question: Just where and how will we produce those "eco-friendly" biofuels?

US
ethanol production alone requires all the corn grown on an area the
size of Iowa (36 million acres), and it makes up only 10% of the
country’s E10 gasoline blends. Replacing all gasoline with ethanol from
corn, sorghum or still-illusory switchgrass would therefore require ten
Iowas: 360 million acres. But there is one other critical factor:
ethanol has one-third less energy per gallon than pure gasoline.

That
means we would need to plant an additional 120 million acres, 480
million acres in all, just to replace gasoline. That’s equal to Alaska,
California and West Virginia combined!

Replacing all the liquid
petroleum we use annually (291 billion gallons) would require twice as
much land – some 45% of all the land in the United States: six times
more land than we currently have under cultivation for all cereal crops –
plowing even marginal croplands, deserts, forests and grasslands.

We’d
also need far more fuel to grow, harvest and convert those crops into
"eco-friendly" fuel. That would likely mean turning southern Canada into
a vast biofuel plantation – unless, of course, the ruling classes
simply impose lower living standards and vehicle ownership restrictions
on us commoners.

Growing biofuel crops also requires hundreds of
times more water than is needed to conduct hydraulic fracturing
(fracking) operations to produce the same amount of energy from oil and
gas, on a tiny fraction of the acreage. Where on this water-starved
planet will that precious liquid come from?

Biofuel crops also
require prodigious amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. And if organic
and anti-GMO factions have their way, far more land would be needed,
pest control would be minimal or done by hand, and fertilizer would come
from human wastes and animal manure – raising even more complex issues.

To put it bluntly, a biofuel future would be totally and disastrously unsustainable.

There’s
another deep, dark secret about biofuels. Somebody needs to tell Obama,
McCarthy, Clinton, Sanders and their army of "green" supporters that
biofuels are hydrocarbons! They are composed of carbon and hydrogen,
though in less complex molecular structures than what we pull out of the
ground – which means we get less energy per gallon. And when we burn
them, they release carbon dioxide!

We have at least a century of
untapped oil and natural gas (and of coal) right under our feet. To lock
that up, based on unproven, illusory, fabricated, fraudulent climate
chaos claims, is utter insanity.

Even crazier, most
anti-fossil-fuel zealots also oppose nuclear and hydroelectric power –
and want future electricity generated primarily or solely with wind
turbines and solar panels. To blanket our scenic, crop and wildlife
lands with wind farms, solar installations and biofuel plantations – and
destroy economies, jobs, living standards, health and welfare in the
process – is nothing short of criminal.

President Obama and
presidential candidates Clinton and Sanders assure us we can have 30%
renewables by 2030, 50% by 2050, 100% by 2100 – or some similar magic,
catchy, sound bite concoction.

Voters should demand to know
exactly how they will make this happen. If they cannot or will not
answer satisfactorily, a strong case can be made for the proposition
that they are too ignorant and dishonest to hold office – and that their
supporters are too stupid and anti-environment to vote. J

A
group of prominent scientists have united for an odd quest: to reduce
funding for science education. They’ve joined with environmental groups
and progressive activists to demand that hundreds of museums of science
and natural history "cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and
funders of climate science obfuscation," which means rejecting donations
or investment dividends from anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of
purity.They began last year by demanding that the American Museum of
Natural History in New York have nothing to do with the industrialist
David Koch, a major benefactor and member of the museum’s board of
trustees for more than two decades. There was no evidence that Koch had
influenced the content of any exhibit at the museum—donors are
prohibited from involvement—but the activists got their wish this year
when Koch resigned from the board. Though he and the museum said his
departure was voluntary, the activists are hailing it as a victory and
pointing to other museums, including the Phipps Conservatory in
Pittsburgh and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, that
have divested themselves of fossil-fuel investments and banned
donations from these companies.

Nearly 150 academics have signed
on to the cause, including George Woodwell, founder and director
emeritus of Woods Hole Research Center; James Powell, former president
of the science museums of Los Angeles and of the Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia; and some prominent climate researchers, like James Hansen
of NASA, Michael Mann of Penn State University, and Kevin Trenberth of
the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They claim to be concerned
that museums compromise their integrity "by association with special
interests," but some interests are obviously more special than others.
The scientists and their allies haven’t objected, for instance, to the
Boston Science Museum’s wind-energy exhibit being sponsored by an
engineering firm that helps build wind farms or by a Massachusetts state
agency with the explicit mission of promoting wind power.

Only
fossil-fuel companies are targeted, supposedly because they’re causing
climate science to be distorted or censored, yet the scientists and
their allies can’t point to any damning examples. Their favorite
accusation involves a Koch-sponsored exhibition at the Smithsonian on
human evolution and adaptation that includes one panel asking if
millions of years from now, some humans’ bodies might have adapted to
various new environmental conditions—a hotter planet, a colder planet,
or another planet with lower gravity. What’s wrong with asking those
questions? Nothing, except that the mere mention of human adaptation is
taboo to devout greens: There must be no distractions from their
predictions that global warming will wipe out the human species.

If
you’re looking for biased environmental science at museums, you can
find it, but the bias goes the other way, toward eco-alarmism and
left-wing politics. Before any more scientists denounce David Koch’s
influence at the American Museum of Natural History, they might try
visiting the place first. A good place to start the tour, for historical
perspective, is in one of the least popular parts of the museum: the
Hall of New York State Environment. It’s a quaint nook with a musty
collection of dioramas from the early 1950s, long before Koch was on the
board.

The human impact on the environment is depicted in a historical series of dioramas of Dutchess County in upstate New York.First,
there’s "The Forest Primeval," some of which is cut down to make room
for "The Settlement" in the 1790 diorama. Most of the forest has given
way to farmland in the 1840 diorama, titled "High Tide." But by 1870,
some of the farmland is lying fallow, and by 1950, much of it has been
covered again with forest. One cause of this trend is depicted in the
tiny models of farming equipment, a progression from a simple ox-drawn
plow to more elaborate machines drawn by horses and, ultimately, by a
motorized tractor. By 1950, the diorama’s copywriter exults, "the
invention of the gas engine" and "the remarkable development of
specialized machines" enabled farmers to grow more food with less labor
on less land, allowing farmland to revert to forest.

That is
indeed a remarkable trend, but you would never guess it from the modern
environmental exhibits at the museum—the ones that get a lot more
visitors. In the Hall of Biodiversity, there are no homages to gas
engines and machines. Fossil fuels and modern technologies are the great
villains. Photographs and videos of gas pumps and smokestacks are
juxtaposed with images of traffic jams, smog-filled skies, and vanishing
woodland. Forests are shown being destroyed by pollution, burned by
farmers, and bulldozed to make room for ranches, roads, and factories.
Nowhere is there a hint that the rest of the world is going through the
same transition that occurred in the United States: the rate of global
deforestation has slowed and has already reversed in many places. Just
as in upstate New York, the amount of forestland in China and India has
been increasing.

Which message do the visitors take home? A few
years ago, I went to the museum and gave a quiz to a class of
high-school students who had just toured it. I asked about two long-term
trends in the United States: Was air pollution getting better or worse,
and was the amount of forestland increasing or decreasing? None of the
students—nor their teacher—got both questions right. Most had no idea
that air pollution has been declining for decades while the amount of
forestland has been increasing.

You can’t blame them, given what
they’d just seen at the Hall of Biodiversity. The message is
unrelentingly gloomy, and sometimes just outdated or wrong. There’s an
image of a forest supposedly decimated by acid rain, which was a
much-proclaimed eco-catastrophe three decades ago—until an extensive
federal study concluded that there was ‘"no evidence of widespread
forest damage." There are warnings of resource shortages and admonitions
to "reduce, reuse, recycle—and rethink."

One exhibit panel
claims that "global warming has already resulted in more frequent and
severe coastal storms as hurricanes," which is contradicted by both data
and theory. There has been no upward trend in hurricanes over the past
half century (the last decade has been especially calm), and the United
Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that
"future changes in storms are likely to be small." A video shows much of
Florida and Long Island disappearing under the rising
ocean—representing a sea-level rise far beyond what IPCC projects.

The
hype was even worse when the museum presented a special show on climate
change in 2008. The exhibition, which toured other science museums in
the United States and abroad, displayed a model of lower Manhattan under
16 feet of water, while the rest of the world was ravaged by storms,
droughts, fires, and plagues.

In a review of the exhibition for
the New York Times, Edward Rothstein criticized it for being concerned
less with science than with frightening visitors. "What we need from a
museum is not proselytizing but a more reflective analysis," he wrote,
complaining that the exhibition "made me feel like an agnostic attending
church and listening to sermons about damnation."

Unfortunately,
that’s the trend in science museums, as Rothstein has documented over
the past decade while writing about museums and exhibitions for the
Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Curators pride themselves on
promoting moral agendas. Showing the wonders of nature is no longer
enough: visitors must be hectored to transform their lives, check their
privilege and prejudice, respect native cultures, and save the planet.
"Over the last two generations," Rothstein concluded in 2010, "the
science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology
often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that
believe their mission is to inspire political action." And the political
actions are inevitably the sort that academics deem "progressive."

Given
this trend, why would anyone worry about the influence of donors like
David Koch? Even if conservatives ever imagined they could use their
money to promote their ideology, they’ve so obviously failed that they’d
be idiots to expect any future returns on it. Since they’re not shaping
science exhibits to their politics, why not use their money to make
better museums that teach more people about science?

Because the
current campaign against Koch and other donors isn’t really about
science or museums. It’s about politics. The campaign is sponsored by a
coalition of environmental and progressive groups, including MoveOn.org
and the Working Families Party. It’s being led by a group calling itself
The Natural History Museum, which sends a bus around the country with
exhibits about "the socio-political forces that shape nature."

The
group is financed by various foundations promoting progressive causes
like "the relationship between economics, racism, climate, gender and
sexual orientation" (as one donor, Solidaire, describes its interests).
The donors also include a group promoting the construction of green
buildings (another apparently acceptable special interest) as well as
the Queens Museum (New Yorkers’ tax dollars at work!). The Natural
History Museum’s mission statement isn’t easy to understand—it reads
like a sophomore trying to impress his Marxist professor of
sociology—but it seems to be mainly about moving beyond the evils of
"capitalist enterprises" to "a collective future."

To reach this
future, the group is using the modern Left’s favorite method of debate:
silence the opposition. The activists and the scientists allied with
them are following the twelfth of Saul Alinksy’s "Rules for Radicals":
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The
letter to museums is part of the larger campaign to demonize David Koch
and other conservatives, to deny them any public credit for their
philanthropy, and to prevent any reputable institution from having
anything to do with them. The goal is not only to punish David Koch for
his support of conservative groups but also to intimidate other
philanthropists. The letter is a warning shot to donors and
corporations: if you give money to a conservative cause, you will be
banished from museums and respectable society.

In this fight, the
science museums are just bystanders. If their budgets suffer, if their
visitors end up paying higher admission fees or seeing fewer exhibits,
that’s just collateral damage. A dedicated leftist can excuse it as a
small tradeoff to reach our glorious collective future. But the curators
and scientists who have signed on to the cause have no excuse for the
damage they’re doing. They’re supposed to give science priority over
politics—or at least that used to be the professional ethic. These days,
it’s looking as outdated as those dioramas from the 1950s.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

10 April, 2016

Meltdown: More Rain, Less Snow as the World Warms

One
of the great tricks of chartmanship ("How to lie with graphs") is to
choose carefully your starting and end points for any trend. And that
appears to have been done here. Why start at 1950? Surely
precipitation records go a long way further back than that.

And
the end point is interesting too. With all the admissions by
Warmists themselves that C21 has seen a "hiatus" in warming, why were
C20 and C21 results all lumped in together and presented as a
single continuous trend? There WAS some slight warming in
C20 so it is entirely open for us to conclude that the trends they
observed were entirely located in the C20 data and there were no trends
in our present century. Most unimpressive work

As
the world warms, the meaning of winter is changing. In the U.S., a
greater percentage of winter precipitation is falling as rain, with
potentially severe consequences in western states where industries and
cities depend on snowpack for water, and across the country wherever
there is a winter sports economy.

A Climate Central analysis of
65 years of winter precipitation data from more than 2,000 weather
stations in 42 states, found a decrease in the percent of precipitation
falling as snow in winter months for every region of the country. Winter
months were defined as the snow season for each station, from the month
with the first consistently significant snow, to the last.

In
western states where snowpack is critical, we found decreases in the
percent of winter precipitation falling as snow at elevations between
sea level and 5,000 feet. Above 5,000 feet there is clear regional
variation. In California, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and
New Mexico there was either no trend toward rain or a slight trend
toward more snow at elevations 5,000 feet and higher. In stark contrast,
between 5,000 to 8,000 feet in Montana, Idaho, and Arizona, from 75 to
78 percent of all stations report an increase in rain as a percentage of
total winter precipitation. Oregon has only one station above 5,000
feet, but it too reported a strong increase in rain vs snow as winter
precipitation. Washington has no stations at this elevation.

These
very different results at elevations above 5,000 feet may stem from the
different underlying climate and weather patterns in the two regions
that has delayed the shift toward more rain above 5,000 feet in Rocky
Mountain states, but accelerated it in the Northwest.

In
virtually all states with stations below 2,000 feet, the data show a
trend toward a higher percentage of rain during the winter precipitation
season.

I
am no botanist, though it was my favorite High School subject, but I
know enough to suspect some very dubious botany below. I have already
pointed out the flaw in the story about plant stomata and I can't help
laughing about the alleged perils to food plants of a slightly raised
level of atmospheric CO2.

Why? Because if it really
were a hazard we should all be dead. And why is that?
Because a lot of our vegetables these days are grown in
greenhouses. And what is the first thing a greenhouse owner does
to boost his crops? He pumps the CO2 level in them up to around
1,000 ppm, more than double what is in the outside air. Yet
somehow our health seems to have survived that awful "threat"!
Warmists do talk an incredible amount of shit. It gets very
wearing after a while

And for decades we were told by the health
freaks that carbs were good and fats were bad. The balance of
opinion now seems to be the exact opposite of that but who knows the
truth of it? The various instances of people living happily on
very limited diets suggest that the human body is very flexible and
forgiving in what it needs to maintain health

And I am not even happy with the first sentence below. The increase in CO2 levels halted completely last year.
Did all our factories close down for the year or is the increase in CO2
mostly natural? Proxy studies into the remote past certainly show
great natural variations in CO2 levels and even today CO2 emissions
vary seasonally

Is that enough skepticism for now?

UPDATE: My suspicions about bad botany were right. We read here
that "Low protein in cereal grains is indicative of poor nitrogen
supply to the grain during the grain fill period". CO2 is not even
mentioned. Did I mention that Warmists talk an incredible amount
of shit?

WE ARE undoubtedly pumping ever more carbon
dioxide into the air. But did you know that this also silently adds
unwanted carbs to bread, cereals and salad and cuts vital protein and
mineral content?

This nutritional blow is now worrying the
world’s most powerful nation. For the first time it forms a key finding
in an official report on the health impacts of climate change in the US,
drawn up by the Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and unveiled by
the White House this week.

Why would more CO2 mean poorer food?
Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, are the carbohydrate factories
of the world. They convert CO2 and water into gigatonnes of starch and
sugars every year. And every year since the industrial age began, we
have steadily fed them more CO2.

Plants respond by building more
carbohydrates but less protein into tissues. This means a higher ratio
of carbs to protein in plants, including key crops such as wheat, rice
and potato. This is a double whammy: protein deficiency afflicts the
developing world, while excess carbohydrate consumption is a worry in
the obesity-riven developed world.

This is not the only
nutritional impact. To capture CO2, plants open pores in their leaves.
These stomata let in CO2 but allow water out: plants compensate by
sucking moisture from the soil. Transpiration, as this process is
called, is a major hydrological force. It moves minerals essential for
life closer to the roots, nourishing plants and ultimately us. But
plants respond to high CO2 by partially closing stomata and losing less
water. This reduces the flow of nutrients to roots and into plants. Less
minerals but more carbs creates a higher carbs-to-minerals ratio in
crops and food.

In an elevated CO2 world, every serving of bread,
pasta, fruits and vegetables delivers more starch and sugar but less
calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, protein and other vital nutrients.
Over a lifetime, this change can contribute to weight gain.

Hidden
hunger – the result of diets rich in calories but poor in vital
nutrients – was mainly a developing world problem. But in 2002, New
Scientist predicted that "elevated CO2 levels threaten to bring the…
problem to Europe and North America". Scepticism made it difficult to
secure funding for testing this prediction and slowed progress by a
decade.

However, the conclusion is now unequivocal: rising CO2
depletes protein and minerals in most food that underpins human
nutrition across the world.

Sceptics like to claim that rising
CO2 is a boon because it boosts crop yields. But as US Department of
Agriculture scientist Lewis Ziska put it "elevated CO2 could be junk
food" for some plant species.

Global
warming could be WORSE than experts think: Study says researchers have
underestimated heating effect of clouds on climate change by 'at least a
degree'

Nice to see a claim that all the previous climate
models were wrong. I could have told them that. But what
prices this new model being correct? Not a good bet considering
all the past failures, I would say

Most computer simulations
of climate change are underestimating by at least one degree how warm
the world will get this century, a new study suggests.

It all comes down to clouds and how much heat they are trapping.

According
to the study published Thursday in the journal Science, computer model
simulations say there is more ice and less liquid water in clouds than a
decade of satellite observations show.

'We saw that all of the models started with far too much ice,' said co-author Trude Storelvmo, a Yale atmospheric scientist.

'When
we ran our own simulations, which were designed to better match what we
found in satellite observations, we came up with more warming.'

Storelvmo's lab at Yale has spent several years studying climate feedback mechanisms associated with clouds.

Little
has been known about such mechanisms until fairly recently, she
explained, which is why earlier models were not more precise.

'The
overestimate of ice in mixed-phase clouds relative to the observations
is something that many climate modelers are starting to realize,' Tan
said.

The more water and less ice in clouds, the more heat is trapped and less the light is reflected, said the study.

She
said even though it tens of degrees below freezing, the clouds still
have lots of liquid water because they don't have enough particles that
helps the water turn to ice crystals.

Because as the climate
changes, there will be more clouds with far more liquid, and global
warming will be higher than previously thought, Storelvmo said.

Equilibrium
climate sensitivity is a measure used to estimate how Earth's surface
temperature ultimately responds to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide
(CO2).

Specifically, it reflects how much the Earth's average surface temperature would rise if CO2 doubled its preindustrial level.

In
2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated
climate sensitivity to be within a range of 2 to 4.7 degrees Celsius.

The Yale team's estimate is much higher: between 5 and 5.3 degrees Celsius.

Such an increase could have dramatic implications for climate change worldwide, note the scientists.

'It
goes to everything from sea level rise to more frequent and extreme
droughts and floods,' said Ivy Tan, a Yale graduate student and lead
author of the study.

How much warming is predicted for the next 80 or so years depends a lot on if society cuts back on carbon dioxide emissions.

In
the worst case scenario, with no carbon reduction, the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sees temperatures rising by
about 6.7 degrees by the end of the century and Storelvmo said the
liquid cloud factor would add another degree or more on top of that.

While
the study is 'well-reasoned' and 'sobering,' there are uncertainties
with the satellite observations that raise questions for Chris
Bretherton at the University of Washington, who wasn't part of the
study.

He said if the Yale team is right and there's a bigger cloud feedback, why hasn't warming so far been even higher?

A
record number of more than 130 countries will sign the landmark
agreement to tackle climate change at a ceremony at U.N. headquarters on
April 22, the United Nations said Thursday.

Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon is hosting the signing ceremony on the first day that the
agreement reached in Paris in December opens for signature.

The
U.N. chief, French President Francois Hollande and French Environment
Minister Segolene Royal, who is in charge of global climate
negotiations, have invited leaders from all 193 U.N. member states to
the event.

The U.N. said signatures from over 130 countries,
including more than 60 heads of state and government, would surpass the
previous record of 119 signatures on the opening day for signing an
international agreement. That record is held by the opening day signing
of the Law of the Sea treaty in 1994.

The U.N. stressed that the
signing ceremony is the first step in ensuring that the agreement enters
into force as soon as possible.

It will take effect 30 days
after at least 55 countries, accounting for 55 percent of global
greenhouse gas emissions, deposit their instruments of ratification or
acceptance with the secretary-general.

It requires all countries to submit plans
for climate action and to update them every five years, though such
plans are not legally binding.

That's a legitimate question,
Storelvmo said, but computer simulations may also be underestimating the
cooling effect of aerosols that mask the warming but are diminishing in
the atmosphere.

This is just the latest in a series of studies
that have found that mainstream science may be too conservative in
estimating the pace and effects of warming, including melting ice sheets
in Antarctica.

'None of this is good news,' Storelvmo said. 'You
always hope that climate isn't as sensitive to carbon dioxide as we
fear, same with the ice sheets, but we're calling it as we see it.
Several studies have come out and show that we've been too conservative
up until now.'

Uncertainties in mainstream climate science are
more 'on the bad side' than on the side of less harm, said climate and
glacier scientist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, who
wasn't part of the study.

'Climate science thus is probably more open to criticism of being too conservative than being too alarmist.'

The
melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is the probable
cause but both seem due to vulcanism, not CO2 emissions

Something
strange is happening to our planet. Around the year 2000, the North
rotational pole started migrating eastward at a vigorous clip. Now,
scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have figured out what’s
going on — and you’ll be shocked to learn that humans are behind it.

The
rotational axis of any planet, including our own, is in constant flux.
That’s because planets aren’t perfect spheres, but bumpy, pitted things
whose mass is always on the move. "If you take a chunk of material from
some area, you are breaking the symmetry, and the spin axis starts
moving," Surendra Adhikari of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told
Gizmodo.

Through careful observations and mathematical models,
Adhikari has discovered that our planet’s recent polar wanderlust has
two causes: the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets,
and changes in the global distribution of water stored on land. Both of
these are related to a single underlying phenomenon.

"The bottom
line is that climate change is driving the motion of the polar axis,"
Adhikari said. His findings are published in Science Advances today.

Scientists
have taken careful measurements of Earth’s spin axis since 1899. Prior
to the 21st century, the pole wandered toward Hudson Bay, Canada, moving
at a rate of about seven centimetres a year. This long-term migration
is believed to be related to the loss of the Laurentide ice sheet, which
blanketed Canada and much of the northern United States during the last
ice age.

But around the turn of the century, our spin axis
charted a new course. The planet’s north rotational pole is now heading
east, along the Greenwich Meridian, and it’s moving twice as fast as it
was before. "Scientists believed that this must be related to the
melting of the Greenland ice sheet," Adhikari said. "That’s been the
general understanding."

The White House launches a scary campaign about deadly heat. Guess what: Cold kills more people

BJORN
LOMBORG sets it all out below. I have already said similar things
about the "report" he discusses but he says it better

The
Obama administration released a new report this week that paints a stark
picture of how climate change will affect human health. Higher
temperatures, we’re told, will be deadly—killing "thousands to tens of
thousands" of Americans. The report is subtitled "A Scientific
Assessment," presumably to underscore its reliability. But the report
reads as a political sledgehammer that hypes the bad and skips over the
good.

It also ignores inconvenient evidence—like the fact that cold kills many more people than heat.

Climate
change is a genuine problem that will eventually be a net detriment to
society. Gradually rising temperatures across decades will increase the
number of hot days and heat waves. If humans make no attempts whatsoever
to adapt—a curious assumption that the report inexplicably relies on
almost throughout—the total number of heat-related deaths will rise. But
correspondingly, climate change will also reduce the number of cold
days and cold spells. That will cut the total number of cold-related
deaths.

Consider a rigorous study published last year in the
journal Lancet that examined temperature-related mortality around the
globe. The researchers looked at data on more than 74 million deaths in
384 locations across 13 areas: cold countries like Canada and Sweden,
temperate nations like Spain, South Korea and Australia, and subtropical
and tropical ones like Brazil and Thailand.

The Lancet
researchers found that about 0.5%—half a percent—of all deaths are
associated with heat, not only from acute problems like heat stroke, but
also increased mortality from cardiac events and dehydration. But more
than 7% of deaths are related to cold—counting hypothermia, as well as
increased blood pressure and risk of heart attack that results when the
body restricts blood flow in response to frigid temperatures. In the
U.S. about 9,000 people die from heat each year but 144,000 die from
cold.

The administration’s new report refers to this study—it
would be difficult to ignore, since it is the world’s largest—but only
in trivial ways, such as to establish the relationship between
temperature and mortality. Not once does this "scientific assessment"
acknowledge that cold deaths significantly outweigh heat deaths.

The
report confidently claims that when temperatures rise, "the reduction
in premature deaths from cold are expected to be smaller than the
increase in deaths from heat in the United States." Six footnotes are
attached to that statement. But one of the cited papers doesn’t even
estimate cold deaths; another flat-out disagrees with this assertion,
projecting that cold deaths will fall more than heat deaths will rise.

Further,
the figure that made it into news reports, those "tens of thousands" of
additional deaths, is wrong. The main model that the administration’s
report relies on to estimate temperature-related mortality finds, in a
worst-case scenario, 17,680 fewer cold deaths in 2100, but 27,312 more
heat deaths—a net increase of 9,632.

Moreover, the model
considers cold deaths only from October to March, focusing on those
caused by extreme temperatures in winter. Most cold deaths actually
occur during moderate temperatures, as the Lancet study shows. In the
U.S., about 12,000 people die from extreme cold each year but 132,000
die from moderate cold. In London, more than 70% of all cold-related
deaths occur on days warmer than 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Although extreme
temperatures are more deadly, they occur only a few days or weeks a
year, whereas moderate cold comes frequently.

Thus, one of the
central findings in the administration’s new report is contradicted by a
large number of scientific studies from around the globe. A 2009 paper
from the European Union expects that the reduction in cold deaths will
definitely outweigh extra heat deaths in the 2020s. Even near the end of
the century, in the 2080s, the EU study projects an increase in heat
deaths of "between 60,000 and 165,000" and a decrease of cold deaths of
"between 60,000 and 250,000." In other words, the effects will probably
balance each other out, but warming could save as many as 85,000 lives
each year.

An academic paper published two years ago in
Environmental Health Perspectives similarly shows that global warming
will lead to a net reduction in deaths in both the U.K. and Australia.
In England and Wales today, the authors write, statistics show that heat
kills 1,500 people and cold kills 32,000. In the 2080s, they calculate
that increased heat will kill an additional 3,500. But they find that
cold deaths will drop by 10,000. In Australia the projections suggest
700 more heat deaths but 1,600 fewer cold deaths.

Globally, one
estimate of the health effects of climate change, published in 2006 by
Ecological Economics, shows 400,000 more respiratory deaths (mostly from
heat) by midcentury, but 1.8 million fewer cardiovascular deaths
(mostly from cold).

In pushing too hard for the case that global
warming is universally bad for everything, the administration’s report
undermines the reasonable case for climate action. Focusing on only the
bad side of the ledger destroys academic and political credibility.

Although
there is a robust intellectual debate on heat and cold deaths, there is
a much simpler way to gauge whether people in the U.S. consider higher
temperatures preferable: Consider where they move. Migration patterns
show people heading for warm states like Texas and Florida, not snowy
Minnesota and Michigan.

That’s the smart move. A 2009 paper in
the Review of Economics and Statistics estimates that because people
seek out warmth, slightly more die from the heat, but many fewer die
from the cold. In total, the actions of these sun-seekers avert 4,600
deaths in the U.S. each year. You won’t be surprised to learn that the
study wasn’t mentioned in the administration’s half-baked report.

If
you’ve ever used a Hydro Flask, you are probably as enamored with this
product as I am. Hydro Flask makes the claim that their containers
will keep your chilled beverage cold for up to 24 hours and your heated
beverage warm for 6-12 hours. By my experience, this is not an
exaggeration. Imagine the pleasure of indulging in 40 ounces of
ice cold beer at the end of a six hour hike into desert
wilderness. In fact, don’t imagine it, do it! So good!

1.

In
this paper, I am going to reveal the secret of the Hydro Flask.
In order to do so, I must subject you to a fair bit of science.

To
understand what it takes to keep things hot for 6-12 hours compared to
keeping things cold for 24 hours requires a basic understanding of
thermodynamics. Sadly, much of this may be new to you. This
knowledge will also serve you well in understanding the natural forces
which really do affect our climate.

Heat can only flow in one
direction, from warmer to cooler. It’s never the other way around.
To do otherwise would violate the Laws of Thermodynamics. There are
four methods by which heat can flow and each method has its own
efficiency and hierarchy which is dependent on the environment in which
it operates. These four methods are evaporation/condensation,
conduction, convection and radiation.

Evaporation is far and away
the most efficient means of removing heat from a warm body. Our
bodies engage in this technique constantly as we sweat to maintain our
desired body temperature. This is also the primary method by which the
Earth cools its surface, be it land or water. Condensation is just
the inverse of evaporation or evaporation in reverse.

Evaporation
is so incredibly efficient at cooling because it involves phase change,
namely a liquid material converting to the gaseous form of that same
material. In the cases of our bodies and the Earth’s surface, we
are talking about evaporating water.

For water, which gets my
vote as being the most miraculous substance in the universe, we can
witness one aspect of this miracle every time we boil water. You
have a pretty good idea how much heat you need to add to freezing water
to increase its temperature to the boiling point, from 32 F to 212 F, a
temperature increase of 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the water
hits the boiling point, it then takes over five times that amount of
heat to convert all of that water to steam (water vapor) with
essentially no temperature rise at all.

Another miracle of water
is that it doesn’t have to boil to evaporate. But it still takes
that same amount of energy per unit volume to make the transition from
liquid to vapor. Your sweat is a case in point and the same thing
happens with soil moisture and the water in our lakes, streams and
oceans. It is the evaporative process that carries most solar
heating away from the earth’s surface. It’s very efficient. Nature
loves it.

Conduction, the second choice of Nature, occurs when a
warm body is in thermal contact with another body. This technique
is used regardless of the phase state of the material. It may be
solid to solid, solid to liquid, solid to gas or any combination of the
three states of material common to planet Earth. The heat flow is
always from warmer material to cooler material regardless of the phase
states.

If the material receiving the heat from the other
material is liquid or gas, thermal conduction usually results in
convection. When added to conduction, convection greatly increases
the efficiency of heat transfer. If you have a convection oven and have
compared the preheating and cooking times to that of a conventional
oven, you know just what this means. Before diving into the subject of
convection and how it relates to Earth’s climate, we need to know a bit
about air, the stuff that makes up our atmosphere.

Because water
vapor has the unique ability to change phases within our atmosphere it
is found in extremely variable amounts from nearly zero to over 4% by
volume. For this reason it is standard procedure when discussing
the composition of air to characterize it as being dry air with no water
vapor. Dry air is composed of 78% Nitrogen, 20.9% Oxygen, and 1%
Argon. CO2 and methane, both so called greenhouse gases, are also
present in trace amounts at 0.04% and 0.0002% respectively. Again,
water vapor content in the atmosphere varies dramatically ranging from
very nearly zero in arid regions to more than 4% being present in
powerful hurricanes and typhoons. Atmospheric water content also varies
greatly with altitude as the air within the troposphere (the portion of
our atmosphere from surface to around 40,000 feet) becomes cooler with
height and water vapor condenses out to form clouds and precipitation.

It
is important to note here that all matter has the capacity to store
thermal energy, even our atmosphere. This concept of heat capacity
is a fundamental property of all matter. Nitrogen for instance
has a specific heat capacity of 0.25 btu/lb 0F at sea level
pressure. As you may remember from science class, a btu is defined
as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of
liquid water 1 degree Fahrenheit. At one quarter of this value, four
pounds of nitrogen in our atmosphere can store the same amount of heat
as one pound of liquid water. The total mass of our atmosphere is
estimated at around 5.5 quadrillion tons. This is a lot of heat storage.

Water
vapor has a specific heat capacity of 0.36 btu/lb 0F at sea level
pressure, so 2.8 pounds has the same heat storage capacity as 1 pound of
liquid water. With water though we should never forget that in
making the change in phase state from liquid to gas, each pound of water
vapor is storing an additional hidden 970 btu of thermal energy that is
not evidenced by temperature. This energy storage associated with
phase change is called Latent Heat. This latent heat can be released
should the water vapor condense to form clouds or precipitation as it
does typically high up in the atmosphere.

Let’s now take a look at how much heat on a percent basis is contained within the constituents of our atmosphere.

Average
water vapor content in the troposphere is somewhere between 1% and
2%. If we assume 1% water vapor and we take the specific heat
capacities, the latent heat in water vapor and the proportional makeup
of the atmosphere, we wind up with the following distribution of heat
storage in the troposphere, ranked first to last: Nitrogen:
72%; Oxygen: 17%; Water Vapor: 10.5% ; Argon: 0.5%; CO2: 0.04%; Methane:
0.000%.

So in air containing 1% water vapor, Nitrogen contains
72% of the heat, oxygen is second with 17%, water vapor is third with
10.5% and so on. CO2 and Methane are insignificant. Forget
them. They are of no consequence in influencing atmospheric
temperatures within the troposphere where life resides. This basic
physical fact may be contrary to what you have been told. You
have likely been told that CO2, methane and other so called greenhouse
gases trap heat in our atmosphere. This is not possible. Given
that each CO2 molecule is surrounded by 1,950 nitrogen molecules and 522
oxygen molecules (based on air containing 78% nitrogen and 20.9%
oxygen) which are in thermal contact with the CO2 molecule, CO2 has no
ability to trap heat beyond the proportions previously listed.
Thermal contact requires that should they somehow be heated independent
of their neighbors, they must instantly begin sharing that heat with the
neighbors. This in turn would induce convection which moves heat
away from the Earth’s surface toward space. It can be no other
way.

On dry areas of the Earth’s surface, evaporation is absent
due to the lack of moisture. Nature’s second favorite means of
heat transfer is active here. The air at the surface is in thermal
contact with the ground and once the ground is heated relative to the
air, the heat must flow to the air as nature always strives to equalize
the temperature of adjacent matter.

Warming the air causes it to
expand and it becomes less dense relative to the cooler air above
it. Like a hot air balloon, the warmer air becomes buoyant and
rises above the surface thus being replaced with cooler air that in turn
accepts heat from the warmer ground. This process of rising warm
surface air with replenishment by cooler air is called convection.
Conductive heat transfer from the solid or liquid surface to the air
layer with which it makes thermal contact initiates this convection. So
long as the sun is shining, the solar radiation impinging the ground
will continue to keep the ground warmer than the air above it and the
conduction/convection heat transfer process will keep the air
circulating with the temperature gradient moving heat away from the
surface. At night the convection process will eventually equalize
surface and air temperatures and the air will become calm as convection
grinds to a halt.

It is important that you understand that
greenhouses work by allowing light rays to enter the inside of the
greenhouse where the electromagnetic energy from the sun is converted to
thermal energy within the molecular composition of the surfaces and air
within the greenhouse. The walls and roof of a greenhouse present
a barrier to convection, just like your car with the windows closed,
and this restriction allows the greenhouse temperature to rapidly rise
to the point where thermal conduction between the glass and outside air
equalize the energy flows and stop the temperature rise. Even at
greenhouse temperatures over 100 0F, radiant heat loss is not
significant. Because our atmosphere is completely open to
convection within the troposphere, the term "Greenhouse Effect" is a
complete misnomer. The term is not just inaccurate, it is
deceptive.

Radiation is the least efficient method of heat
transfer and generally requires a very high temperature for the
radiating source. Radiation is of utmost importance in terms of
getting heat to transfer across a vacuum. The sun and light bulbs
are good examples of high temperature radiating sources. Light bulbs are
vacuum tubes and since the sun is surrounded by the vacuum of space,
you may view it as a naturally occurring vacuum tube. It is the
fact that the presence of the vacuum precludes more efficient methods of
heat transfer that allows the light bulb filament to achieve the high
temperatures necessary to emit bright visible light.

Since as
described earlier, the Earth’s surface is in thermal contact with the
atmosphere and the surface of the Earth is not at a high temperature as
compared to the sun or a light bulb, radiation can be ignored in terms
of cooling the Earth’s surface. Radiation is nature’s last resort
when it comes to equilibrating temperatures. It is far, far less
efficient than the other forms of heat transfer.

Now back to the Hydro Flask.

2

The
Hydro Flask container is constructed of two stainless steel containers,
one inside the other with the only point of contact being at the upper
rim where they are connected. The space between the two containers
is filled with nothing meaning that a vacuum has been pulled on this
space such that almost no air molecules are present. As with the
vacuum of space, there is no temperature present in this cavity between
the inner and outer containers. Temperature requires matter. No
matter, no temperature. This space is neither cold nor hot.
This is a mysterious concept because you can’t measure the absence of
temperature. To do so would require the insertion of some instrument,
but since a vacuum is defined as the absence of matter, inserting
something into a vacuum renders it no longer a vacuum. It’s a mind
bender. You must use your imagination. Nonetheless the heat
transfer properties of a vacuum are very special.

As described,
the Hydro Flask’s only thermal contact point is at the upper rim and of
course the hollow stopper which is made of plastic with poor thermal
conductivity. This design, with the stopper in place and firmly
sealed, eliminates evaporation and greatly reduces conduction /
convection. At the temperatures desired for hot and cold beverages,
radiant heat transfer is nearly non-existent.

With hot coffee
inside the Hydro Flask at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and with room
temperature at 70 degrees, the heat wants to get out and bring the
coffee to room temperature. The sides of the inner container are
also at 140 degrees, but because of the vacuum next to the outside
surface of the inner container, conduction is impossible and 140 degrees
is too low for significant radiation of heat. The only way for
conduction to work is to pass through the contact points at the rim and
stopper of the Hydro Flask. The smallness of this area of thermal
contact at the rim combined with the insulative properties of the
stopper greatly limit conductive heat transfer. The temperature of
the coffee is sufficient to allow some heat to traverse the rim and
stopper, but it is a slow and inefficient process taking 6-12
hours. As the coffee cools, the rate of heat transfer slows as the
temperature differential between the coffee and outside air diminishes.
The power of a vacuum to stop conductive heat transfer is truly
amazing.

With a chilled IPA at 40 degrees inside the Hydro Flask
and outdoor temperatures at 100 degrees, the desert heat would love to
warm up your beer. As with the coffee example, conductive heat
transfer is pretty much limited to the top of the flask. Now the
interesting question here is why the beer stay cold does for 24 hours
but the coffee only stays hot for 6-12 hours?

Liquids are less
dense at higher temperatures, so with coffee, the hottest coffee is at
the top. As the coffee cools from heat conduction at the top of the
flask, this cooling effect causes the top layer of coffee to become
denser, so it moves toward the bottom of the flask. Convection has
been induced in the coffee. As described previously, this
convection enhances the heat transfer efficiency dramatically by always
keeping the hottest coffee at the top.

With the cold beer, the
warmest part of the beer is at the top as with the coffee, but the
"warm" beer is becoming warmer, so it doesn’t sink and initiate
convection. The warmest part of the beer stays put and doesn’t enhance
cooling of the beer. Thus the beer stays cold much longer than the
coffee stays hot.

The implication here is that if you turn your
coffee flask upside down, so that the hottest least dense coffee is at
the top, which is now the bottom of the flask next to the vacuum, the
coffee should stay hot for much longer because you have stopped
convection in its tracks. Using this technique, you may get many
more hours of hot coffee available to you. The physics says this
will work. Try it and see!

Now that you have a better
understanding of the thermodynamics of heat transfer than 99% of the
people on the planet, let’s conduct a brief examination of the radiative
greenhouse effect (RGHE).

The Powers That Be (TPTB) want you to
live in fear that catastrophic human induced climate change is at your
doorstep. Excessive burning of fossil fuels has been vociferously
identified as the culprit. We are all guilty, especially
Americans, and we must change our evil ways. Since this is a
global problem, we will have to give up our national sovereignty and
work together with all other humans on planet Earth. No holdouts
allowed!

The case for carbon based climate change, previously
known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has at its foundation the
Radiative Greenhouse Effect. Every school child knows that the
greenhouse effect is what allows the Earth to maintain the moderate
temperatures which allows for life as we know it. All of the fear
mongering government agencies and university science departments whose
funding is dependent on this climate of fear will give you their
particular version of the greenhouse effect. Let’s start with the
agency with the forked tongue on their logo.

3

NASA says:

"When
they absorb the energy radiating from Earth’s surface, microscopic
water or greenhouse gas molecules turn into tiny heaters— like the
bricks in a fireplace, they radiate heat even after the fire goes out.
They radiate in all directions. The energy that radiates back toward
Earth heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface, enhancing the
heating they get from direct sunlight.

This absorption and
radiation of heat by the atmosphere—the natural greenhouse effect—is
beneficial for life on Earth. If there were no greenhouse effect, the
Earth’s average surface temperature would be a very chilly -18°C (0°F)
instead of the comfortable 15°C (59°F) that it is today."

There
you have it. The sun heats the Earth’s surface, the surface
radiates to the atmosphere and the "bricks" which compose 0.04% of our
atmosphere radiate back to the surface adding more heat than the sun did
initially. This is the radiative greenhouse effect and every
purveyor of climate alarm uses some variant of this deception. The
deception as you now can see works by substituting radiant heating for
evaporation and conduction / convection. Back heating of the
Earth’s surface is clearly impossible with evaporation and conduction /
convection, but somehow "climate scientists" are able to make the case
that back-radiative heating doesn’t violate the Laws of Thermodynamics.
It does, but it’s not as obvious as with the other heat transfer
methods. It fools most of the people all of the time. And
yes, this makes those people FOOLS.

Now you may ask the question:
"Why isn’t Hydro Flask smart enough to make a new and improved version
of the Hydro Flask coffee mug that fills the vacuum space with carbon
dioxide, methane, water vapor or even better, sulfur hexafluoride which
has, as reported by EPA, a global warming potential on the order of
12,000 times that of CO2. Surely it would keep the coffee hot for
at least a year. In fact, if we can back-radiate more heat than we
started with, as the radiative GHE implies, we should be able to heat
the coffee to boiling. In fact, if you think this out logically,
you should be able to warm yourself in front of a mirror just using your
radiative body heat. How’s that for NASA science?

Now that
you know real thermodynamics and you are smarter than all of the
astrophysicists at NASA, you understand that the Earth is surrounded by
an atmosphere which has both mass and large thermal storage
capacity. This fact alone completely explains the moderate
temperatures found on planet Earth. Not only is a greenhouse effect not
necessary, but it is impossible given the extent of thermal contact
within the troposphere and nature’s preferred methods of heat transfer.

So
where does radiant heating or cooling become important in moderating
temperatures on planet Earth? Only in the upper reaches of the
atmosphere where the vacuum of space abuts the thinness of our outer
atmosphere. This is the area where thermal molecular contact is
lost and the only option for planetary cooling is radiant
emissions. Theoretically, greenhouse gases which are more
radiatively active than nitrogen and oxygen, could enhance this cooling,
but that would first require additional heat to get to this part of the
atmosphere and that amount of heat is set by the mass and composition
of the troposphere. Additional greenhouse gases cannot upset the
balance of heat flow from the Earth’s surface to space. More CO2
means more plant food and that is a wonderful thing.

Within the
troposphere, evaporation/condensation, conduction and convection rule
our climate, and no greenhouse effect is remotely possible or needed.
That’s Real Science!

The secret of the Hydro Flask reveals the
deception hidden within the Anthropogenic Global Climate Change
scam. The truth is out!

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

8 April, 2016

Some Whales Like Global Warming Just Fine

What
they are talking about below is Arctic warming, not global
warming. Arctic warming is not global. It's way out of step
with global temperature

Humpbacks and bowheads are
benefiting—for now, at least—from the retreat of polar sea ice: It's
making it easier for them to find food.

In May 2009, Ari
Friedlaender, an ecologist with Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal
Institute, was cruising along the Western Antarctic Peninsula when he
encountered something he’d never seen. In Wilhelmina Bay, the water was
so thick with humpback whales that "we couldn’t count them fast enough,"
he recalls.

In the end, he and his colleagues counted 306
whales feeding on an immense aggregation of krill. It was the highest
density of humpbacks ever documented in the region.

The
humpback population has been recovering ever since commercial hunting
was banned in 1966. But the whales are also being helped by another
factor: climate change.

In the past, there wouldn’t have been
any humpbacks at all in Wilhelmina Bay in May, because the sea would
have been covered with ice. The whales typically departed their feeding
grounds along the Western Antarctic Peninsula by April, migrating
thousands of miles north to spend the winter breeding in tropical
waters.

But the sea ice is now advancing nearly two months
later than it did in the 1970s and retreating a month earlier.
Humpbacks can now stay in the Antarctic much later in the season and
follow the krill moving inshore in large aggregations. Since that 2009
expedition, Friedlaender has been hearing the whales sing late in the
season, a sign that they might be starting to breed right in Antarctic
waters, without waiting to migrate north. That would be a fundamental
change in their life history.

"We are just beginning to
paint the picture of how quickly and well the humpback whales are able
to use this habitat that was probably not available to them in the
recent past," Friedlaender says.

A World With Less Ice

It’s
not just humpbacks, and not just the Antarctic: Around the planet, as
whale populations recover from commercial hunting, they’re coming back
to a different world. In the Arctic, north of the straits that connect
it to the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the seasonal open-water
period has increased over the past thirty years by between
one-and-a-half and three months.

For species such as polar
bears, which depend on ice for their feeding behavior, that’s bad news.
But humpbacks and other large whale species are benefitting from the
change—at least for now.

In the North Pacific off British
Columbia, the humpback population has been growing steadily at a rate of
about 7 percent per year and is now estimated at more than 21,000
animals. Two years ago the Canadian government downlisted the population
from "threatened" to "species of special concern."

In
both the Pacific and the Atlantic, sub-Arctic species such as humpback
and fin whales are spending more time in the Arctic waters around the
Bering, Davis, and Fram Straits. Over the past five years researchers
using underwater hydrophones to record whale calls have documented the
increase in "summer" whales.

"Recovering populations of
summer whales are taking advantage of a productive and more open
Arctic," says Sue Moore, a biological oceanographer with the Marine
Ecosystems Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA). The retreat and the thinning of the sea ice, she
says, has led to increased and earlier blooms of microscopic plant
plankton. They in turn feed an increase in the tiny crustaceans—copepods
and krill—that feed the whales.

Like their Antarctic
relatives, the North Pacific humpbacks are staying late on the Arctic
feeding grounds. "They might be up there still in November," Moore says,
"when people in Hawaii are starting to think that humpbacks should be
coming down their way for mating."

Good for the Natives Too

Bowhead
whales, which spend their whole lives in and around the Arctic, are
feeding better these days too. "It is a good time to be a bowhead,"
Moore says.

The Alaska population, which migrates between
the Bering Sea and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, had been reduced to
just a few thousand animals when commercial whaling ended in 1910. It
now stands at 17,000. A population that lives in the waters off eastern
Canada and Greenland is increasing too.

"It is dramatic,"
says Craig George, a senior wildlife biologist with the North Slope
Borough's Department of Wildlife Management, who has monitored bowheads
for the last 35 years in Alaska in partnership with the Inupiat hunters
who still harvest bowheads. "The hunters say that back in the 1940s they
would wait all day and see a couple of blows. Now it is hundreds of
blows." George has also documented a marked improvement in the body
condition of young bowheads between 1989 and 2011.

Bowhead,
humpback, and fin whales all use the same environment, but for now, not
at the same time. Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington has
studied the whales in Disko Bay in West Greenland. "You see bowheads
leave, and within a week humpbacks move in," she says. "It is
amazing."

As the sea ice retreats and whales change the
timing of their migrations, however, they may eventually overlap and
start competing for food. Things could get confusing for bowheads and
humpbacks, which are both remarkable singers, says Kate Stafford of the
University of Washington: "Because bowheads are spectacular mimics, it
wouldn't surprise me if a bowhead started sounding like a humpback."

A
new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global
warming "consensus" by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive
to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think.

A
study by scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
found that man-made aerosols had a much smaller cooling effect on the
atmosphere during the 20th Century than was previously thought. Why is
this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely
cause less warming than most climate models suggest.

What do
aerosols have to do with anything? Well, aerosols are created from human
activities like burning coal, driving cars or from fires. There are
also natural aerosols like clouds and fog. Aerosols tend to reflect
solar energy back into space, giving them a cooling effect that somewhat
offsets warming from increased CO2 emissions.

The Max Planck
study suggests "that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more
certain than is commonly believed." In layman’s terms, aerosols are
offsetting less global warming than was previously thought. And if
aerosols aren’t causing as much cooling, it must mean carbon dioxide
must be causing less warming than climate models predict.

"Going
forward we should expect less warming from future greenhouse gas
emissions than climate models are projecting," write climate scientists
Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger with the libertarian Cato Institute,
adding that this study could be a "death blow" to global warming
hysteria.

Independent climate researcher Nick Lewis put out a
study last year with Georgia Tech’s Dr. Judith Curry that found that the
climate’s response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels — a
measurement called "climate sensitivity" was 1.64 degrees Celsius.

Lewis
revised his findings based on the Max Planck aerosol study and found
something astounding: climate sensitivity drops dramatically. Lewis also
looked at climate sensitivity estimates given by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change — often regarded as the world’s top authority on
global warming.

The IPCC’s latest assessment put climate
sensitivity between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC says that
despite "the large uncertainty range, there is a high confidence that
aerosols have offset a substantial portion of [greenhouse gas] global
mean forcing."

Basically, the IPCC says aerosols deflect a lot of warming — the opposite of the Max Planck study’s finding.

But
incorporating the results from the Max Planck study dramatically
reduces the upper bound estimate of climate sensitivity from 4.5 degrees
to 1.8 degrees Celsius.

To put this into perspective,
atmospheric concentrations of CO2 currently stand at around 400 parts
per million, if this were to double, according to the IPCC’s estimates
temperatures could rise as high as 4.5 degrees Celsius.

But
incorporate the Max Planck study results and warming would only be as
high as 1.8 degrees Celsius — less than half what the IPCC originally
predicted.

"Such a result will also necessarily drive down
estimates of social cost of carbon thereby undermining a key argument
use by federal agencies to support increasingly burdensome regulations
which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," write Michaels and
Knappenberger.

David
Cameron has no plans to appoint a new climate change envoy, a role he
created in the run-up to the landmark Paris climate summit.

Opposition
politicians said it showed Cameron had given up any pretence of
leadership on climate change and that he was sending out the wrong
signals by not filling the role.

Lord Barker of Battle was
appointed in September 2014 to the position, which Cameron created days
before he addressed a high-profile UN summit and warned climate change
was "one of the most serious threats facing our world".

Cameron
told Barker in a letter last year that the role was an important post
and thanked him for putting the UK in "such a strong position for
international climate change negotiations".

Barker, a loyal ally
of Cameron who accompanied him in 2006 to the Norwegian archipelago of
Svalbard where the then opposition leader was famously photographed
hugging a husky, stepped down from the envoy role and as an MP last
year.

It was then unclear whether a new climate envoy would be
appointed to replace him, but Cameron said in a recent written answer:
"The focus now is on implementation [of the Paris deal]. There are no
plans to appoint a new envoy on climate change at this time."

The
shadow climate and energy minister, Clive Lewis, said: "The prime
minister promised the greenest government ever but he is axing carbon
capture, cutting energy efficiency, blocking wind power, threatening the
solar industry and selling off the green bank.

"Now he’s giving up even the pretence of leading the battle against climate change

Coalitions
are rising up in the U.S. and Europe to oppose taxes on carbon dioxide
emissions to keep industries from fleeing high energy prices.

In
The U.S., conservative groups have joined together to oppose attempts by
federal lawmakers to impose a CO2 tax, and in Europe, steel companies
are fighting for their lives as high energy taxes and competition from
cheap Chinese steel threatens their economic prospects.

In the
United Kingdom the plight of the steel industry has moved at least one
Conservative Party member to propose abolishing the country’s minimum
carbon tax that’s hampering businesses.

"The carbon floor price
must go," said Scottish Conservative Ian Duncan, who promised to write
to British Business Secretary Sajid Javid to end the country’s carbon
tax floor. Duncan and other conservatives are scrambling to stave off
job losses from Tata Steel’s sell-off of U.K. plants.

British
manufacturers have joined Duncan’s calls to scrap the U.K.’s carbon tax
scheme, especially those in energy-intensive industries like steel
producers. The steel industry is under intense competition from Chinese
producers and high energy taxes are cramping their business models.

India-based
Tata Steel recently sold one of its British plants, and the one company
interested in buying the plant will only do so if the U.K. reforms its
carbon tax system.

"German and Italian producers are not subject
to the same carbon tax giving them an unfair advantage and that
discussion will need to be had," the company Liberty House told the U.K.
paper City AM.

In Germany, steel companies are railing against
proposed reforms to the European Union’s cap-and-trade system to boost
the price of emitting carbon dioxide.

EU policymakers are
proposing to raise the price of CO2 permits and reduce the number
available in the government-mandated trading market. The EU wants to
raise prices to make green energy more economical after the price of CO2
permits fell over the last few years — the price collapse made coal
competitive with wind and solar.

"The industrial business model
of the German economy is at stake," Hans Jürgen Kerkhoff, president of
the German Steel Association, said of the EU proposal. "The consequences
for the German economy would be grave."

Germany is already
saddled with some of the highest energy prices in Europe, largely thanks
to taxes slapped on electricity bills to pay for green energy
production. Industry, however, gets compensation from the government to
offset the higher energy costs, but companies are still required to
comply with the EU’s cap-and-trade system.

Proposed EU reforms
could cost Germany 380,000 jobs economy-wide, according to a steel
industry-backed study, and as much as 30 billion euros in lost economic
output.

Across the pond, some 21 U.S. conservative groups signed a
petition opposed to a carbon tax. The anti-carbon tax petition, sent
out by the American Energy Alliance (AEA), has even caught the attention
of Republican presidential candidates who oppose President Barack
Obama’s regulatory push to fight global warming.

Republican
candidates Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz signed AEA’s petition
opposing a carbon tax. The petition also included questions on whether
the candidates opposed the federal ethanol mandate, energy subsidies and
more restrictions for energy production on federal lands.

The
U.S. currently has no federal tax on CO2 emissions, but there have been
efforts by Democratic lawmakers to impose such a tax in recent years.
Also, many conservatives see the Environmental Protection Agency’s
so-called Clean Power Plan as a "backdoor" tax on carbon dioxide.

"The
next president’s approach to energy will not only shape our nation’s
policies, but will also determine the direction of our economy," Tom
Pyle, AEA’s president, said in a statement. "The responses to our
questionnaire provide the American voters with useful insight into how
some of the candidates will handle the most pressing energy issues if
elected."

Trump and Cruz aren’t the only Republicans to oppose
taxing carbon dioxide emissions. The Republican National Committee
recently passed a resolution opposed to a carbon tax.

"That the
Republican National Committee hereby resolves that we should protect
American families and businesses by not imposing a carbon tax but by
opposing a carbon tax and federal and state regulations that create or
lead to a carbon tax," according to the resolution.

The political
fights brewing in the U.S. and Europe come after Australia voted in a
conservative governing coalition in 2013 on the promise of repealing a
carbon tax put in place by the country’s former Labor Prime Minister
Julia Gillard. The conservative coalition, led by former Prime Minister
Tony Abbott, ran on a low-tax, pro-energy platform promising to
eliminate the carbon tax and lower people’s energy bills.

Aussie
lawmakers officially repealed the carbon tax in 2014. The tax cost
Australians an estimates $8.5 billion a year during its two years of
life.

"I should say that at the election, we said to the
Australian people, we said to you, that we wanted to build a
strong and prosperous economy for a safe and secure Australia, and every
day that is what we have been working to bring about," Abbott said in a
press conference following the repeal vote.

As
governments consider far-reaching, costly policies to mitigate any
human contribution to global warming, Christian leaders need to become
well-informed of the scientific, economic, and ethical debates
surrounding the issue.

Consistent with the findings of A Call to
Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against
Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger, an analysis by professor of
climatology David Legates and professor of economics Cornelius van
Kooten, which argues that Abundant, affordable, reliable energy is
indispensable to lifting and keeping people out of poverty and mandatory
reductions in CO2 emissions would greatly increase the price of energy,
goods and services. And would harm the poor more than the wealthy, we
believe the following:

1. As the product of
infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining
(Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating,
and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the
climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious
human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these
natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific
observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage
than magnify it catastrophically.

2. Earth’s
temperature naturally warms and cools cyclically throughout time, and
warmer periods are typically more conducive to human thriving than
colder periods.

3. Athough human addition of
greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), to the atmosphere
may slightly raise atmospheric temperatures, observational studies
indicate the climate system responds more in ways that suppress than in
ways that amplify CO2’s effect on temperature, implying a relatively
small and benign effect rather than a large and dangerous warming.

4.
Empirical studies indicate natural cycles outweigh human influences in
producing the cycles of global warming and cooling, not only in the
distant past but also recently.

5. Computer
climate models, more than 95 percent of which point toward greater
warming than has been observed during the period of rapid CO2 increase,
do not justify belief that human influences have come to outweigh
natural influences, or fears that human-caused warming will be large and
dangerous.

6. Rising atmospheric CO2 benefits
all life on Earth by improving plant growth and crop yields, making food
more abundant and affordable, helping the poor most of all.

7.
Abundant, affordable, reliable energy, most of it now and in the
foreseeable future provided by burning fossil fuels, which are the
primary source of CO2 emissions, is indispensable to lifting and keeping
people out of poverty.

8. Mandatory reductions
in CO2 emissions, pursued to prevent dangerous global warming, would
have little or no discernible impact on global temperatures but would
greatly increase the price of energy and therefore of everything else.
Such policies would put more people at greater risk than the warming
they are intended to prevent, because they would slow, stop, or even
reverse the economic growth that enables people to adapt to all
climates. They would also harm the poor more than the wealthy, and would
harm them more than the small amount of warming they might prevent.

9.
In developed countries, the poor spend a higher percentage of their
income on energy than others, so rising energy prices, driven by
mandated shifts from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to
diffuse, expensive, intermittent "Green" energy, are in effect
regressive taxes, taxing the poor at higher rates than the rich.

10.
In developing countries, billions of the poor desperately need to
replace dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, pollution from
which causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and about 4 million
premature deaths every year, mostly among women and young children. To
demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and depend on
expensive wind, solar, and other "Green" fuels to meet that need is to
condemn them to more generations of poverty and the high rates of
disease and premature death that accompany it.

A Call to Action

In light of these facts,

1.
We call on Christians to practice creation stewardship out of love for
God and love for our neighbors, especially the poor.

3. We call on
political leaders to abandon fruitless and harmful policies to control
global temperature and instead adopt policies that simultaneously
reflect responsible environmental stewardship, make energy and all its
benefits more affordable, and so free the poor to rise out of poverty.

Want to fight global warming? Forget fuel economy standards and focus on land use

Having
led and won the fight in the 1960s and ‘70s to reduce air pollution
from automobiles, California's road regulators turned their sights on a
more ambitious goal: curbing global warming at the tailpipe through
fuel-economy standards. But powerful evidence shows that these standards
are costly for consumers and have almost no impact on the environment.

Of
course, one particular failure does not mean it's impossible to reduce
the overall vehicular contribution to climate change. Rather than trying
to make car trips more efficient, governments could help citizens
reduce their reliance on long daily commutes.

One smart reform:
Better land use policy. Let's take Los Angeles as an example. Despite a
strong history of environmentalism and weather that is the envy of the
world, the built environment in L.A. makes it unrealistic for most
people to walk or bike to work.

Perversely, sprawl is encouraged
by environmental review boards and neighborhood preservation campaigns.
To allow denser, environmentally conscious construction, Sacramento
should repeal the "private right of action" in the California
Environmental Quality Act. The provision allows anonymous front groups
to tie up construction projects in court, dissuading developers from
investing in the first place. Los Angeles should also streamline its
permitting processes and write more permissive zoning laws. None of
these changes would hurt consumers; all of them would make residents
less dependent on cars.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

7 April, 2016

An amusingly projective attempt to psychologize climate skeptics

Salty
Jim from UCLA thinks AGW could not possibly be wrong so there must be
something wrong in the heads of those who disbelieve. He is one of
many preachers of that gospel but see what his particular explanation
is. He says that we skeptics would be social outcasts if we
accepted AGW. It has apparently not occurred to him that exactly
that situation applies to himself. How long would he last at UCLA
if he became a skeptic?

Seeing your own faults and problems in
others is as old as the hills. Sigmund Freud called it
"projection" and identified it as maladjusted. Take a bow, Salty
Jim.

James Salzman is the Donald Bren Distinguished
Professor of Environmental Law with joint appointments at the UCLA
School of Law and at the Bren School of the Environment. "Salz" is
Yiddish for salt

As Dan Kahan, a Yale professor who has long
studied risk perception, puts it, people’s beliefs about climate change
reflect not what they know but who they are. As he describes,

"Social-science
research indicates that people with different cultural values —
individualists compared with egalitarians, for example — disagree
sharply about how serious a threat climate change is. People with
different values draw different inferences from the same evidence.
Present them with a PhD scientist who is a member of the US National
Academy of Sciences, for example, and they will disagree on whether he
really is an ‘expert’, depending on whether his view matches the
dominant view of their cultural group."

So why does this happen?
"What an ordinary individual believes about the ‘facts’ on climate
change has no impact on the climate. What he or she does as a consumer,
as a voter, or as a participant in public debate is just too
inconsequential to have an impact… But if he or she takes the ‘wrong’
position in relation to his or her cultural group, the result could be
devastating for her, given what climate change now signifies about one’s
membership in and loyalty to opposing cultural groups. It could drive a
wedge—material, emotional, and psychological—between the individual
people whose support are indispensable to his or her well-being.

"In
these circumstances, we should expect a rational person to engage
information in a manner geared to forming and persisting in positions
that are dominant within their cultural groups. And the better they are
at making sense of complex information—the more science comprehending
they are – the better they’ll do at that."

Moral psychologist
Jonathan Haidt has made a similar argument about how cultural priors
shape our acceptance and interpretation of facts.

There may well
be other explanations, and I’m eager to hear suggestions, but I think
that Kahan and Haidt are both on to something that explains the views of
many climate skeptics. It certainly seems that for part of the
Republican party climate skepticism has become a proxy for membership.
The challenge lies in how to disentangle one’s position on climate
change from one’s cultural identity or sense of well-being.

In my
view, this is the area with the greatest potential for engaging with
skeptics and will require thoughtful re-framing of the climate debate.
This is already happening to some extent, with the discussion shifting
to energy security, green jobs, and strengthening community resilience.
Things people from all ideological stripes can agree on.

I
grew up in the tropics, where daytime temperatures were in the '90s (F)
for much of the year. People just went to work in those
temperatures as normal. They even performed outdoor manual labor
in those temperatures. My father did for many years. So I
don't think America has much to fear from a rise of just a few degrees
-- JR

White House Science Advisor John Holdren says because
of the impacts of climate change, agricultural and construction workers
"will basically be unable to control their body temperature and will
die."

"In some parts of the world, when you look more broadly at
this question, you see the likelihood that in the hottest times of the
year it will be simply physiologically impossible to work outdoors,"
Holdren said at a White House event on climate change Monday.

"That
means agriculture, that means construction, people who try to work
outdoors will basically be unable to control their body temperature and
will die. This is a really, really big deal. And it’s going to be a big
deal in the hottest parts of the United States as well as the Middle
East, in South Asia and other places."

The White House
live-streamed the announcement of the release of the Obama
Administration’s "The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the
United States: A Scientific Assessment."

"The report projects
that under middle-of-the-road emissions scenarios we could see from
thousands to tens of thousands additional heat related deaths in the
United States each summer," Holdren said.

The White House says
the report was developed "by approximately one hundred experts in
climate-change science and public health – including representatives
from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of
Veteran’s Affairs (VA)."

The Obama Administration is announcing a
series actions to be taken as a result of the report. These include
developing K-12 educational materials on climate change, designating May
23-27, 2016 "Extreme Heat Week" and the creation of a "Climate-Ready
Tribes and Territories" iniative.

WH Warns of Deaths from 'Extreme Heat' as Weather Service Issues April Snow Advisories

The
White House published a report Monday warning that "extreme heat can be
expected to cause an increase in the number of premature deaths"--the
same day the National Weather Service issued winter weather advisories
for April snowstorms.

"From children to the elderly, every
American is vulnerable to the health impacts associated with climate
change, now and in the future," said administration's report.

It
was released by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Surgeon General Vivek
Murthy and John Holdren, head of the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy, the same day the National Weather Service predicted
"another round of wintry precipitation" for the Upper Midwest and Great
Lakes region that could dump up to 10 inches of snow on upstate New
York.

Southern New England also remained under a Winter Weather
Advisory until 8 pm on Monday with sub-freezing temperatures and up to
six inches of snow predicted for some areas.

Another April
snowstorm with 60 mph winds slammed into Massachusetts on Sunday,
killing two people and downing power lines for tens of thousands of
residents.

Dem Sen.: If Clean Power Plan Wins in DC Court, a 4-4 SCOTUS Will Uphold It

Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) says that if the D.C. Circuit Court
considering challenges to the Clean Power Plan makes a ruling in favor
of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "a 4-4 (U.S. Supreme)
court will clearly uphold the decision of the D.C. Circuit."

Whitehouse
joined other Democratic lawmakers in filing an amicus brief Friday in
support of the Clean Power Plan. During a conference call Whitehouse
said he’s hopeful the brief will have some impact.

"I hope that
with this brief we can come out of the D.C. Circuit with a very strong
opinion- and with that very strong opinion a 4-4 court will clearly
uphold the decision of the D.C. Circuit and we can go forward and do the
people’s business.

"We need to protect our planet and our economy from the ravages of an industry that is out of control," Whitehouse said.

In
February, the U.S. Supreme Court halted implementation of the Obama
Administration’s Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon dioxide emissions
from power sectors in each state, until the 27 states bringing a
lawsuit against the EPA’s rules is heard.

The D.C. Circuit will begin hearing oral arguments on the case this June.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently operating with only eight justices after the Feb. 13 death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

U.S.
labor unions scored a major victory Tuesday with a tie vote in a
high-profile Supreme Court case after the deadlocked 4-4 decision came
in a case considering whether unions representing government employees
can collect fees from workers who do not join.

A
new Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans are now opposed to
hydraulic fracturing (more commonly referred to as "fracking").
According to the survey, when asked if they "favor or oppose …
‘fracking’ as a means of increasing the production of natural gas and
oil in the U.S.," most of the responds, 51%, said they opposed it, while
just 36% were in favor. Thirteen percent had no opinion.

These
results stand in relatively stark contrast to the same survey taken last
year, when the results showed a 40-40 split, with 19% expressing no
opinion. Gallup notes, "One major reason the price of [oil] has remained
so low is fracking, which now accounts for half of the oil production
in the U.S." You would expect that to foster growing support for
fracking, particularly among Republicans — many of whom subscribe to the
"drill baby drill" philosophy. But the Gallup poll surprisingly found
that it’s precisely this group that saw the biggest shift. In 2015, 66%
of Republicans approved of fracking, but that dropped to 55% in the new
poll. Meanwhile, support dropped by just 1% among both Independents and
Democrats.

What to make of this? It’s unclear why Republican
support is what’s dropping the fastest. But according to Gallup, there
are two primary drivers likely at play. For starters, "Americans' turn
against fracking comes as the percentage predicting there will be a
critical energy shortage in the next five years has fallen to a new low,
likely because of lower gas prices. With oil and gas relatively cheap,
many Americans may not see the need to fracture the earth through
fracking." Secondly "Fracking is potentially a cause of earthquakes
across sections of the U.S. that are not used to these types of natural
disasters. The U.S. Geological Survey said this week that 7 million
Americans are at risk of experiencing earthquakes caused by fracking in
the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and
Arkansas. With more than 1,000 earthquakes in the central U.S. alone
last year, these events could be linked to the rising percentage of
Americans who oppose fracking."

However, researchers have
discovered a major caveat on the issue of earthquakes that the media is
largely ignoring. Last year a study by Stanford found that it’s not
fracking, per se, that’s to blame, but rather the aftereffects of
wastewater. As Stanford Professor Mark Zoback reported, "What we’ve
learned in this study is that the fluid injection responsible for most
of the recent quakes in Oklahoma is due to production and subsequent
injection of massive amounts of wastewater, and is unrelated to
hydraulic fracturing [emphasis added]." Even the the U.S. Geological
Survey says, "Fracking causes extremely small earthquakes, but they are
almost always too small to be a safety concern. In addition to natural
gas, fracking fluids and salt water trapped in the same formation as the
gas are returned to the surface. These wastewaters are frequently
disposed of by injection into deep wells. The injection of wastewater
and salt water into the subsurface can cause earthquakes that are large
enough to be felt and may cause damage."

That’s a problem
innovation would suggest can eventually be solved. If Americans want to
continue enjoying low gas prices — which, ironically, Gallup suggests
may be why they feel we no longer need fracking — they will need to
embrace the technique that’s saving them dollars at the pump.

Global Warming in the Hot Seat With CLIMATE HUSTLE, Coming to Theaters This May

Produced
in the unique, entertaining and informative style that has made CFACT
(Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow) and Marc Morano's
ClimateDepot.com one of the world's most-sought-after sources for facts
about climate issues, "Climate Hustle" will tear the cover off the
global warming debate to further investigate this multi-billion-dollar
issue. Fathom Events and SpectiCast present this thought-provoking event
on Monday, May 2, 2016, at 7:00 p.m. local time. In addition to the
feature, audiences will also view an exclusive panel discussion and
opening remarks by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House
Science, Space and Technology Committee, headlined by special guest
Governor Sarah Palin (2008 Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, 9th
Governor of Alaska), and including notable climate experts and an
appearance by Emmy Award-winning educator Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Tickets
for "Climate Hustle" can be purchased online by visiting
www.FathomEvents.com or at participating theater box offices. Fans
throughout the U.S. will be able to enjoy the event in nearly 400 movie
theaters through Fathom's Digital Broadcast Network. For a complete list
of theater locations visit the Fathom Events website (theaters and
participants are subject to change).

Award-winning investigative
journalist Marc Morano, host of "Climate Hustle," said: "This film is
truly unique among climate documentaries. 'Climate Hustle' presents
viewers with facts and compelling video footage going back four decades
and delivers a powerful presentation of dissenting science, best of all,
in a humorous way. This film may change the way you think about 'global
warming.'"

"Climate Hustle" takes a probing look at the many
questions surrounding global warming issues today. Is there scientific
consensus regarding emissions from our cars, factories, and farms or is
man-made "global warming" an environmental con job being used to push
for increased government regulations and a new "green" energy agenda?
This event will examine the history of climate scares and debunk claims
by activists calling us to "act immediately before it's too late." This
event also profiles key scientists such as Georgia Tech Climatologist
Dr. Judith Curry, former NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John Theon, and
French physicist and Socialist Party member Claude Allègre, who used to
believe in climate alarm but have since converted to skepticism.

"Climate
change is certainly one of the hot-button issues at the forefront of
some of the fiercest political debates. This event aims to shed light on
varied perspectives and initiate healthy and timely conversation around
this important topic," said Fathom Events Vice President of Programming
Kymberli Frueh.

"'Climate Hustle' is an extremely timely event,
especially given the relevant political discussion surrounding global
warming," said Mark Rupp, Co-founder and President of SpectiCast
Entertainment. "We feel it is important to share all viewpoints on the
climate change issue, and 'Climate Hustle' provides a perspective not
generally shared with the public at large in an informative and engaging
way."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

6 April, 2016

Rogue organization explains Australia's warm waters

Australia's BoM has often been caught out making unwarranted
"adjustments" to Australia's temperature record. They are so
crooked that they couldn't lie straight in bed. So the screed
below is amusing. The seas around Australia -- and Australia has a lot
of those -- have apparently warmed up a bit recently. So that's
got to be global warming, right? They say so but in a very guarded
way. They agree that most of the causative factors are natural
but slip in: "with a substantial contributor being human-caused climate
change".

Hey! No numbers? These guys are supposed to
be scientists and scientists quantify. How much is
"substantial"? They can't say because they are afraid to
say. If "a substantial contributor is human-caused climate
change", then CO2 levels must have risen a lot, right? But we can
easily check that. Australia has its very own CO2 monitoring
station at Cape Grim. So what does Cape Grim tell us about recent
CO2 levels? It tells us that CO2 levels have been stuck --
completely plateaued -- on 398ppm for the last 7 months. Check it for yourself. So the temperature rise was NOT caused by a CO2 rise and the human contribution was therefore zero. More BoM lies

This summer’s sea temperatures were the hottest on record for Australia: here’s why

The summer of 2015-2016 was one of the hottest on record in Australia.
But it has also been hot in the waters surrounding the nation: the
hottest summer on record, in fact.

Difference in summer sea surface temperatures for the Australian region
relative to the average period 1961-1990. Australian Bureau of
Meteorology

While summer on land has been dominated by significant warm spells,
bushfires, and dryness, there is a bigger problem looming in the oceans
around Australia.

This summer has outstripped long-term sea surface temperature records
that extend back to the 1950s. We have seen warm surface temperatures
all around Australia and across most of the Pacific and Indian oceans,
with particularly warm temperatures in the southeast and northern
Australian regions.

Last summer’s sea surface temperature rankings for Australia. Australian Bureau of Meteorology

In recent months, this warming has been boosted – just like land temperatures – by natural and human-caused climate factors.
Why so warm?

These record-breaking ocean temperatures around Australia are somewhat
surprising. El Niño events, such as the one we’re currently
experiencing, typically result in cooler than normal Australian waters
during the second half of the year. So what is the cause?

The most likely culprit is a combination of local ocean and weather
events, with a substantial contributor being human-caused climate
change.

In the north, the recent weak monsoon season played a role in warming
surface waters. Reduced cloud cover means more sunshine is able to pass
through the atmosphere and heat the surface of the ocean. Trade winds
that normally stir up the water and disperse the heat deeper into the
ocean have also remained weak, leaving the warm water sitting at the
surface.

In the south, the East Australian Current has extended further south
over the summer. This warm current flows north to south down Australia’s
east coast. Normally it takes a left turn and heads towards New
Zealand, but this year it extended down to Tasmania, bringing warm
waters to the south east.

This current is also getting stronger, transporting larger volumes of
water southward over time. This is due to the southward movement of high
pressure systems towards the pole.

High pressure systems are often associated with clear weather in
Australia, and when they move south they prevent rain. This southward
movement over time has also been linked to climate changes in our
region, meaning that changes in both rainfall and ocean temperatures are
responses to the same global factors.

We’ve also seen high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean. Around
2010, temperatures in the region suddenly jumped, likely because of the
La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean. The strong events during this period
transferred massive amounts of warmth from the Pacific Ocean into the
Indian Ocean through the Indonesian region.

The warmer waters in the Indian Ocean have persisted since and have
influenced land temperatures. The five years since the 2010 La Niña are
the five hottest on record in southwest Western Australia (ranked 2011,
2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012).
What are the impacts?

The world’s oceans play a major role in global climate by absorbing
surplus heat and energy. Oceans have absorbed 93% of the extra heat
trapped by the Earth since 1970 as the greenhouse effect has increased.
This has lowered the rate at which the atmosphere is warming – which is a
good thing.

However, it also means the oceans are heating up, raising sea levels as
well as leading to more indirect impacts, such as shifting rainfall
patterns.

As a nation that likes to live by the coast as well as enjoy recreation
activities and harvest produce from the sea, warmer-than-usual oceans
can have significant impacts.

Australia derives a lot of its income from its oceans and while such
impacts aren’t often seen immediately, they become apparent over time.

Warm sea temperatures this summer and in the past have seen declines in
coral reef health, and strains on commercial fisheries and aquaculture.
The Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing coral bleaching amid
very warm water temperatures.

Our neighbouring Pacific islands have also seen the impacts of these
very high sea surface temperatures, with recent mass fish kills and
coral bleaching episodes in Fiji.

The impacts of warmer ocean temperatures are also felt on land, as ocean
temperatures drive climate and weather. Abnormally high sea surface
temperatures may have contributed to the intensity of Cyclone Winston as
cyclone potential intensity increases with ocean temperature.

"Last Month Was The Hottest March In The Global Satellite Record, And The Arctic Is Still Sizzling"

So says professional Warmist JOE ROMM below, quite ignoring the fact
that the warming was ENTIRELY due to natural factors such as El Nino. So
let us have a look at that "sizzling" Arctic. The picture below
is from Summit Station in
the middle of Greenland, where the temperature at the time of writing
was 34 degrees Celsius BELOW zero. Very strange sizzling!
Exaggeration is very common among liars. They even claim that 97%
of scientists agree with them. Why not 100%? Whoops!
Oreskes made that claim too

Last month was the hottest March on record, according to newly-released
satellite data. And it followed the hottest February on record. The
Arctic was literally off-the-charts warm last month, as we’ll see. It’s
no surprise, then, that Arctic sea ice set a record for the lowest
maximum extent.

I sometimes feel like I am the boy who declared that the emperor had
no clothes. Nearly every day I find myself pointing out that a
claim is GLARINGLY wrong.

The huge and fancy report by many
authors described below is another example. It is just solid
BS. It ignored the basic truth that cold is a lot more fatal than
warmth, which is why hospitals struggle more in winter. So warming
should REDUCE illness.

After that bad start they makes
all sorts of links between global warming and other things that really
ARE bad for you -- such as air polltion -- without provding any
substantial evidence of such a link. And the link asserted can be
the opposite of the truth -- such as the threat of more extreme
weather events. That the incidence of extreme weather events has in fact been declining for a century bothers them not a bit.

They are arrant liars and crooks. Don't they have a conscience? Old-fashioned of me to think they should, I guess

Climate change can be expected to boost the number of annual premature
deaths from heat waves in coming decades and to increase mental health
problems from extreme weather like hurricanes and floods, a US study
suggests.

"I don't know that we've seen something like this before, where we have a
force that has such a multitude of effects," Surgeon General Vivek
Murthy told reporters at the White House about the study.

"There's not one single source that we can target with climate change, there are multiple paths that we have to address."

Heat waves were estimated to cause 670 to 1,300 US deaths annually in recent years.

Premature US deaths from heat waves can be expected to rise more than
27,000 per year by 2100, from a 1990 baseline, one scenario in the study
said. The rise outpaced projected decreases in deaths from extreme
cold.

Extreme heat can cause more forest fires and increase pollen counts and
the resulting poor air quality threatens people with asthma and other
lung conditions.

The report said poor air quality will likely lead to hundreds of
thousands of premature deaths, hospital visits, and acute respiratory
illness each year by 2030.

Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post
traumatic stress disorder, depression, and general anxiety can all
result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change,
such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing
the risks to mental health, it said.

Cases of mosquito and tick-borne diseases can also be expected to
increase, though the study, completed over three years, did not look at
whether locally-transmitted Zika virus cases would be more likely to hit
the United States.

President Barack Obama's administration has taken steps to cut carbon
emissions by speeding a switch from coal and oil to cleaner energy
sources.

In February, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the White House's climate
ambitions by putting a hold Obama's plan to cut emissions from power
plants. Administration officials say the plan is on safe legal footing.

John Holdren, Obama's senior science adviser, said steps the world
agreed to in Paris last year to curb emissions through 2030 can help
fight the risks to health.

"We will need a big encore after 2030 ... in order to avoid the bulk of the worst impacts described in this report," he said.

Quantification of the Diminishing Earth’s Magnetic Dipole Intensity
and Geomagnetic Activity as the Causal Source for Global Warming within
the Oceans and Atmosphere

David A. E. Vares et al.

ABSTRACT

Quantitative analyses of actual measurements rather than modeling have
shown that “global warming” has been heterogeneous over the surface of
the planet and temporally non-linear. Residual regression analyses by
Soares (2010) indicated increments of increased temperature precede
increments of CO2 increase. The remarkably strong negative correlation
(r = ?0.99) between the earth’s magnetic dipole moment values and global
CO2-temperature indicators over the last ~30 years is sufficient to be
considered causal if contributing energies were within the same order of
magnitude. Quantitative convergence between the energies lost by the
diminishing averaged geo- magnetic field strength and energies gained
within the ocean-atmosphere interface satisfy the measured values for
increased global temperature and CO2 release from sea water. The pivotal
variable is the optimal temporal unit employed to estimate the total
energies available for physical-chemical reactions. The positive drift
in averaged amplitude of geomagnetic activity over the last 100 years
augmented this process. Contributions from annual CO2 from volcanism and
shifts in averaged geomagnetic activity, lagged years before the
measured global temperature-CO2 values, are moderating variables for
smaller amplitude perturbations. These results
indicated that the increase in CO2 and global temperatures are primarily
caused by major geophysical factors, particularly the diminishing total
geomagnetic field strength and increased geomagnetic activity, but not
by human activities. Strategies for adapting to climate change
because of these powerful variables may differ from those that assume
exclusive anthropomorphic causes.

China briefly halted approval of new nuclear power plants as it reviewed
safety standards in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in
2011, but is now deeply embracing the energy source.

The country is keen to tap cleaner power to fuel its power-hungry economy in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment

The nation gets about 2 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power
and aimed to raise the level to 6 per cent by 2020. The country is
operating 30 plants with a capacity of 26.9GW and another 24 are under
construction. They will add another 28.8GW when they come online.

The nation’s latest five-year plan calls for a dramatic increase
non-fossil fuel energy sources, in part by accelerating development of
coastal nuclear power plants by 2020 to 58GW.

The head of the China Atomic Energy Authority, Xu Dazhe, was quoted
recently by Xinhua as saying the country needed to speed up its nuclear
power development while improving safety standards for the industry.

China General Nuclear Power and rival China National Nuclear plan to build four more reactors on mainland

President Xi Jinping detailed China’s nuclear security policies at an
international conference in 2014. He said the nation would give top
priority to the peaceful use of nuclear energy while managing nuclear
materials and facilities by the highest standard. “China has maintained a
good record of nuclear security in the past 50 years and more,” he
said. Xi pledged to enhance the government’s regulatory capacity,
increase investment in technology and talent while strengthening nuclear
security capability.

European Union climate and energy commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete has
been ensnared in the controversy surrounding the newly-released “Panama
Papers,” which detail how the global warming czar’s wife invested in a
shady Panama-based law firm.

Cañete’s wife, Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont, reportedly was “empowered
to approve transactions of Rinconada Investments Group SA, a Panama
company registered in 2005 which was in existence while her husband
Miguel Arias Cañete held public positions in Spain and the European
Union,” according to The Spain Report.

“She was listed as authorized signatory together with members of her
Spanish aristocratic Domecq family. Six siblings were also connected to
Rinconada Investments Group,” TSP noted, citing reports by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Documents showing Solís-Beaumont’s involvement with RIG were part of
11.5 million leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm obtained by
ICIJ. The so-called “Panama Papers” detail hundreds of shell companies
used by politicians and executives to hide their wealth and possibly
engage in shady deals.

The papers also expose “the offshore holdings of 12 current and former
world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir
Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow
companies,” according to ICIJ.

“The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128
more politicians and public officials around the world,” the news group
reported.

The papers reveal that Cañete’s wife involved with one such financial
institution that may have been used to hide the financial dealings of
public officials — though ICIJ noted there are legitimate reasons to
hold money in an offshore company.

Solís-Beaumont’s lawyer told ICIJ “she had declared all of her income
and assets to Spanish tax authorities” and noted “Rinconada is not
active and that [Solís-Beaumont] has no power or attorney and is not “an
authorized signatory for the company.”

Cañete’s spokesman said “since his 1978 marriage to Domecq Beaumont that
each spouses’ assets at the time of the marriage and after that ‘belong
and are administered separately, according to Spain’s Civil Code.’” The
spokesman also said “the company had no activity for several years
before he took office as a member of the European Parliament.”

What’s more, though, is ICIJ reports Cañete wife and her family
benefited from government bull breeding subsidies while her husband was
in office.

“He urged expansion of EU agriculture subsidies to cover bull breeding,”
ICIJ reports. “During his time in the ministry, his wife’s
world-renowned Jandilla bull operations, managed by their two sons,
Pablo and Juan Pedro, and co-owned by her siblings, received well over
$1 million in farm subsidies. Her other farm, forestry and winery
businesses also received EU subsidies.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

5 April, 2016

Atmospheric ozone levels have neither declined nor grown since 1987

MEAN GLOBAL TOTAL OZONE FROM GROUND STATION DATA: 1987-2015

JAMAL MUNSHI

ABSTRACT:

Latitudinally weighted monthly mean global ozone is estimated using
total ozone data from sixteen ground stations at latitudes from 89 S to
71 N and longitudes 170 E to 170 W. Data from all sixteen stations are
available without gaps for a 29-year sample period from January 1987 to
December 2015. The monthly mean global ozone series does not show a
sustained decline that can be interpreted in terms of the
Rowland-Molina-UNEP theory of ozone destruction by man-made halogenated
hydrocarbons. The findings validate the results of a prior work which
used satellite data for trends in mean global total ozone over much
shorter sample periods.

CONCLUSIONS

It is found that the OLS linear trend for the latitudinally weighted
global monthly mean total ozone does not have a statistically
significant trend. To test whether the absence of a linear trend can be
explained by non-linear patterns that favored depletion in earlier times
followed by accretion at later times we examined the pattern of Lustrum
means over the entire sample period and found that Lustrum to Lustrum
changes in latitudinally weighted global total ozone were random and did
not follow a pattern that could be interpreted in terms depletion
followed by accretion.

It’s been a rough stretch for Climate Armageddon religionists and totalitarians.

Real World science, climate and weather events just don’t support their
manmade cataclysm narrative. The horrid consequences of anti-fossil fuel
energy policies are increasingly in the news. And despite campaigns by
the $1.5-trillion-per-year government-industry-activist-scientific
Climate Crisis Consortium, Americans consistently rank global warming at
the very bottom of their serious concerns.

But instead of debating their critics, or marshaling a more persuasive,
evidence-based case that we really do face a manmade climate
catastrophe, alarmists have ramped up their shrill rhetoric, imposed
more anti-hydrocarbon edicts by executive fiat and unratified treaty –
and launched RICO attacks on their critics.

Spurred on by Senator Sheldon “Torquemada” Whitehouse (D-RI), Jagadish
Shukla and his RICO-20 agitators, and their comrades, 16 of the nation’s
18 Democratic attorneys general (the other 32 are Republican) announced
on March 29 that they are going after those who commit the unpardonable
offense of questioning “consensus” climate science.

If companies are “committing fraud,” by “knowingly deceiving” the public
about the threat of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and climate
change, New York AG Eric Schneiderman intoned, “we want to expose it and
pursue them to the fullest extent of the law,” under the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. “The First Amendment
does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

Their initial target is ExxonMobil, but other companies, think tanks
like CFACT and the Heartland Institute (with which I am affiliated), and
even independent researchers and analysts (like myself) will be in
their crosshairs – using a law intended for the Mafia. Incredibly, even
United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch says her office has
“discussed” similar actions and has “referred [the matter] to the FBI.”

These RICO investigations and prosecutions are chilling, unprecedented
and blatantly un-American. They abuse our legal and judicial processes
and obliterate the First Amendment freedom of speech rights of anyone
who questions the catechism of climate cataclysm. The AGs’ actions are
intended to browbeat skeptics into silence, and bankrupt them with
monumental legal fees, fines and treble damages.

It is the campus “crime” of “unwelcome ideas” and “micro-aggression” on
steroids. It is the inevitable result of President Obama’s determination
to “fundamentally transform” the United States, ensure that electricity
rates “necessarily skyrocket,” and carve his energy and climate policy
legacy in granite.

Mr. O and his allies are on a mission: to rid the world of fossil fuels,
replace them with “clean” biofuels (that are also carbon-based and also
emit carbon dioxide when burned, but would require billions of acres of
crop and habitat land) and “eco-friendly” bird-killing wind turbines
and solar installations (that will require millions more acres) – and
implement the goals of a dictatorial United Nations.

Former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change Christiana Figueres put it in the bluntest terms: “We are setting
ourselves the task of intentionally to change [sic] the economic
development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” – the
free enterprise capitalist system. “The next world climate summit is
actually an economic summit, during which the distribution of the
world’s resources will be negotiated,” her UN climate crisis cohort
Otmar Edendorfer added. “We will redistribute de facto the world’s
wealth by climate policy.”

Thus, under the 2015 Paris climate treaty, developing nations will be
under no obligation to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas
emissions. They will simply take voluntary steps, when doing so will not
impair their efforts to drive economic growth and improve their
people’s living standards. Meanwhile, they will be entitled to share $3
billion to $300 billion per year in “climate change adaptation,
mitigation and reparation” money. In fact, Mr. Obama has already
transferred $500 million in taxpayer money (illegally) from a State
Department emergency fund to the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

No wonder developing nations were thrilled to sign the 2015 Paris not-a-treaty treaty.

But Climate Crisis ruling elites pay little attention to this. They will
be insulated, enriched, and protected from their decisions and
deceptions – as they decide what energy, jobs, living standards and
freedoms the poor, minority, blue-collar and middle classes will be
permitted to have.

Equally disturbing, their drive for total control is based on a chaotic
world that is totally at odds with what the rest of us see outside our
windows. Even after “homogenizing” and massaging the raw data, climate
alarmists can only show that global temperatures may have risen a few
tenths of a degree (barely the margin of error) during the 2015 El Niño
year, after 19 years of no temperature increase, following two decades
of slight warming, following three decades of slight cooling and
warming.

On the “extreme weather” front, tornadoes, snows, floods and droughts
are no more frequent or intense than over the past century. No Category
3-5 hurricane has made US landfall in a record 125 months. Polar ice
remains well within historic fluctuations, and sea levels are rising at
barely seven inches per century.

Alarmists thus rely on computer models that predict even “worse
catastrophes,” if global temperatures rise even 0.5 degrees C (0.8 F)
more than they already have since the Little Ice Age ended and
Industrial Era began. However, the models are hopelessly deficient, and
totally unable to predict the climate.

They overstate the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide and methane,
atmospheric gases chosen because they result from fossil fuel use (and
from many natural sources). They assume these two gases have become the
primary forces in climate change – and ignore or downplay changing solar
energy, cosmic ray and geomagnetic output; major periodic fluctuations
in Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean circulation; volcanic activity;
regional and planetary temperature cycles that recur over multiple
decades, centuries or millennia; and other natural forces that have
always driven planetary warming, cooling and weather.

The models and modelers do this because these factors and their roles in
climate change are not well understood, are difficult to measure, and
do not fit the “humans are at fault” meme. They compound these errors by
assuming that any warming will be dangerous, rather than beneficial for
people and agriculture.

These oversights can be characterized as careless, recklessly negligent,
or even “knowingly deceitful” and fraudulent. So can “nine inconvenient
untruths” that a United Kingdom judge highlighted in Al Gore’s infamous
fake-documentary movie – and Mr. Gore’s recent claim that atmospheric
CO2 is fueling Zika outbreaks. Likewise for James Hansen’s repeated
assertion that sea levels could rise “several meters” (117 inches) over
the next century, and the bogus studies behind the phony “97% consensus”
claims.

Can you picture the cabal of AGs filing RICO actions in these cases? If
you want the facts, and a few chuckles about climate alarmism, see the
Climate Hustle movie, coming May 2 to a theater near you.

Via email

Britain's race to go green is killing heavy industries

If the government really wants to save energy-intensive industries,
it must delay setting new emissions targets for the fifth carbon budget,
as the climate change act entitles it to do

Britain’s energy levies may be good for men in suits at conferences but
they’re bad for the men in boiler suits. British steel production
is on the verge of vanishing.

Before [steelworks] Redcar and Port Talbot, remember Lynemouth, where
Britain’s last large aluminium smelter closed in 2012. In aluminium, as
in steel, China is now by far the largest producer, smelting five times
as much as any other continent, let alone country. The chief reason
aluminium left (though a small plant survives at Lochaber) was the
sky-high electricity prices paid in Britain: electrolysis is how you
make aluminium. For extra-large industrial users, British electricity
prices are the highest in Europe, twice the average, and far higher than
in Asia and America.

Britain has the highest electricity prices because it has the most
draconian climate policies. Despite promises not to do so, the
government insists on going faster than other countries in emissions
reduction. As Lord Deben, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change,
put it recently, apparently without intended irony, the British approach
to climate legislation is the envy of most countries in the world. At
green conferences maybe.

As well as paying huge and growing bills to subsidise those futile
playthings of the rich, the wind and solar industries, energy-intensive
industry also picks up the cost of the “carbon price floor”, a tax on
fossil fuels used to generate electricity, which was introduced in 2013
and doubled last year to £18.08 per tonne of carbon, or more than four
times the cost of the European emissions trading scheme, of £4 a tonne.
This can have little impact on climate, however, not only because
Britain’s emissions are less than 2 per cent of global emissions, but
because it merely exports jobs and emissions.

Port Talbot’s blast furnace is less dependent on electricity than
aluminium smelters, but those who say that high electricity prices are
not contributing to steel’s collapse are missing three key points.
First, downstream processes in the steel industry such as galvanising
use a lot of electricity; second, steel production elsewhere is
increasingly shifting to electric-arc furnaces, which recycle scrap
steel — and generate fewer emissions. That’s not likely at Port Talbot
because of Britain’s high electricity prices. The country’s one
electric-arc furnace, run by Celsa in Cardiff, is struggling, and we
mostly export rather than melt our mountains of scrap.

And third, as the Global Warming Policy Forum points out, climate
policies affect the cost of all goods and services purchased by
industry, including labour. According to government estimates, by 2030
medium-sized businesses would see prices 114 per cent higher than they
would be in the absence of climate policies, and they would need to pass
those costs on to customers.

So aluminium and steel are mere harbingers of heavy industry doom
because of our costly energy. As the think tank Civitas reported at the
time of Lynemouth’s closure, “There are still many other
energy-intensive industries left in the UK, such as glass, chemical and
ceramic manufacturing. Together these are worth £75 billion and employ
700,000 people and they are just as vulnerable to the future rises in
energy costs.”

Lord Deben’s committee is tasked by Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change
Act with giving the government impartial advice on how to meet that
act’s targets. No other EU member state has yet set a legally binding
2030 target, but the committee announced in November its recommendation
for a fifth “carbon budget”, that by 2030, Britain should generate 57
per cent fewer carbon dioxide emissions (from heat, transport,
electricity and industry) than in 1990. The government must respond by
the end of June.

That’s awkward because, as Peter Lilley, MP, has spotted, the deadline
is likely to precede any decision by the EU about how to share the
burden of meeting the promise it made at the Paris climate conference in
December to reduce European emissions by 40 per cent by 2030. If
Britain is already committed to reductions of 57 per cent, it can hardly
complain if the European Council agrees lesser reductions for other
countries, so as to hit the target of 40 per cent for the union as a
whole. It is, in effect, a unilateral gift of jobs to other countries —
if we stay in the EU.

Speaking at the Institute of Public Policy Research shortly before the
launch of his committee’s latest report, the impartial Lord Deben was
asked about the impact on energy-intensive industry. He replied that
“heavy energy users will have to find ways of being less heavy users”.
Charming. This they are indeed doing, by putting steelworkers on
benefits, where they emit less. But shifting the work to China may
actually increase emissions since China gets more of its energy from
coal. Lord Deben added, incredibly, that there is “no evidence at all of
offshoring due to climate policy”. I wonder if he dares say that in
Wales.

By now, most people probably know about one of Secretary Hillary
Clinton’s biggest campaign gaffes to date: “we’re going to put a lot of
coal miners and coal companies out of business.” As soon as I heard it, I
tweeted: “Imagine a presidential candidate running for office based on
putting people out of work?”

I wasn’t the only one shocked by the uncharacteristic clarity of her
statement. Lacking the usual political-speak, her comments were all the
more surprising in that they were not made at a fundraiser in
billionaire environmental donor Tom Steyer’s posh San Francisco living
room. They were made in Ohio—coal country, where coal production in 2015
was down 22 percent—at a nationally televised CNN town hall and just
hours before the important state’s primary election.

In response, Christian Palich, President of the Ohio Coal Association
sent this: “Hillary Clinton’s callous statements about coal miners,
struggling under the weight of a hostile administration, are
reprehensible and will not be forgotten. The way Secretary Clinton spoke
so nonchalantly about destroying the way of life for America’s coal
families was chilling. Come tomorrow, or next November, Ohioans in coal
country will vote to keep their jobs and not for the unemployment line.”

US News reports that Democrats in the coal states of Wyoming, West
Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio have tried to “distance themselves from
Clinton’s comments.” Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, a Clinton ally
who handily won his party’s primary election for Senator, called her
slip, “unartful.” Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who, last April, endorsed
Clinton, took issue with her comments and contacted her campaign.coal
miners 1974

Facing the backlash, and in damage-control mode, Clinton sent a letter to Manchin: “Simply put, I was mistaken.”

But was she? I don’t think so.

Though her comments may have been “unartful” and, arguably, poorly
timed, I believe they reflect private conversations and campaign
strategy. It may be no coincidence that rumors of President Obama’s
tepid support for Clinton—though the White House denies endorsing
her—surfaced after her killing coal comments.

First, it is clear that Clinton needs President Obama’s endorsement. She
needs him to generate excitement for her lackluster campaign—something
Democrat voters are not feeling for her as they did for him. She needs
his campaign machine to get out the votes.

But, he needs her just as much—his legacy hangs on her election. Because
so much of what he’s done has been by executive action, his legacy can
just as easily be undone—as every remaining Republican candidate would
likely do. Obama is, reportedly, committed to “a hard campaign of
legacy preservation.” He is ready to “raise money to fill Democratic
coffers and target the key communities that would make up a winning
coalition for the party, including blacks, Latinos, educated single
women and young voters, to encourage them to go to the polls.”

Following the voluntary climate agreement in Paris, Politico stated:
“Barack Obama wants to be remembered as the president who saved the
world from climate change.” For this legacy to stick, all of his
anti-fossil fuel policies must stay intact. To get his endorsement, a
Democrat presidential candidate must embrace what he started and promise
to “build upon President Obama’s legacy of environmental protections
and climate action,” as Clinton has.

While Obama frequently claims to support an “all of the above” energy
policy, actions speak louder than words. From his 2009 stimulus bill
throwing billions at speculative green energy projects, his killing coal
efforts, his stand that we can’t drill our way to low gas prices, his
rejection of the Keystone pipeline, and his threat to veto a bill to
lift the oil export ban—just to name a few—he obviously meant “none of
the below.”

The White House denies a “war on coal.” In December, after the Paris
climate agreement was signed, former Deputy Assistant to the President
for Energy and Climate Change, Heather Zichal, defended Obama’s green
platform: “Nobody’s screaming that their energy bills are on fire; jobs
have not been lost.”

Bill Bissett, President of the Kentucky Coal Association called Zichal’s
comments: “insulting and inaccurate.” He told me: “The Obama
Administration and its allies have an intentional blind spot to the
economic and social damage that their anti-coal policies are causing in
the United States and especially in coal country. The top coal producing
states in our nation not only benefit from the extraction of coal, but
all of us benefit greatly from having low kilowatt-per-hour rates. But
that economic advantage is eroding as Obama does everything in his
power, and against the will of Congress, to move the United States away
from coal production and use.” He added: “More than 8,000 Kentucky coal
miners have lost their jobs since Obama took office and countless other
Kentuckians have lost their livelihoods through indirect and induced job
loss due to his anti-coal agenda. And, yes, our electricity rates are
increasing in Kentucky as our country moves away from coal.”

“Ms. Zichal and the administration can spin it anyway they like but no
one outside of their fringe enviro friends is clamoring for their energy
policies,” said Mike Duncan, President of the American Coalition for
Clean Coal Electricity.

While much of the electricity price increases associated with the Obama
Administration will only be seen later, the fact is, according to an
Energy Information Agency data set, the increase in retail electricity
prices since 2008 is 12.8 percent.

Clinton’s anti-coal comments got all the press. But she didn’t stop
there. Almost under her breath, a few sentences later, she added: “We’ve
got to move away from coal and all of the other fossil fuels”—more
pandering for Obama’s much needed (and, so far, withheld) endorsement.

But how realistic is the Democrat’s goal of moving away from coal and all the other fossil fuels?

“Unlikely,” according to new research from the University of Chicago.
The authors wanted a different answer. Like Clinton, and Obama, they
believe fossil fuel use is driving “disruptive climate change” that will
lead to “dramatic threats to human well-being” and a “dystopian
future.” Reading the 22 pages of the report on their findings, one can
almost feel their dismay.

Yet, after discussing “supply theory”—which posits the world will run
out of inexpensive fossil fuels—they state: “If the past 35 years is
(sic) any guide, not only should we not expect to run out of fossil
fuels anytime soon, we should not expect to have less fossil fuels in
the future than we do now. In short, the world is likely to be awash in
fossil fuels for decades and perhaps even centuries to come.”
Complicating matters, the authors acknowledge: “a substantial
penetration of electric vehicles would reduce demand for oil. Provided
that the supply curve for oil is upward sloping (as it is in almost all
markets), this drop in demand would translate to lower oil prices,
making gasoline vehicles more attractive.”

Then, on “demand theory”—the economy will stop demanding fossil fuels as
alternatives become more cost competitive—they lament: “In the
medium-run of the next few decades, none of these alternatives seem to
have the potential based on their production costs (that is without the
government policies to raise the costs of carbon emissions) to reduce
the use of fossil fuels below these projections.” Additionally, they
conclude: “Alternative sources of clean energy like solar and wind
power, which can be used to both generate electricity and to fuel
electric vehicles, have seen substantial progress in reducing costs, but
at least in the short- and middle-term, they are unlikely to play a
major role in base-load electrical capacity or in replacing
petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines.”

While the authors support “activist and aggressive policy choices…to
drive reductions in the consumption of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas
emissions,” they reluctantly admit the proposed solutions are not apt to
be the answer they seek. “Even if countries were to enact policies that
raised the cost of fossil fuels, like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade
system for carbon emissions, history suggests that technology will work
in the opposite direction by reducing costs of extracting fossil fuels
and shifting their supply curves out.”

Perhaps, before Clinton—who accuses anyone who doesn’t agree with her
climate alarmist view as ignoring the science—makes mistakes, like
declaring that she’ll put coal miners and coal companies out of
business, she should check the science behind her claims to “move away
from coal and all the other fossil fuels.”

Making her March 13 comments seem even more foolish, the following days
cast a shadow over the specter of funding more speculative solar power,
as she’s proposed to do. Three stimulus-funded solar failures made big
headlines.

On Wednesday, March 16, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) announced
that the massive $2.2 billion ($1.5 billion in federal loans according
to WSJ, but other research shows more) Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating
System may be forced to shut down because it has failed to produce the
expected power. What it has produced: “fetched about $200 a mega-watt
hour on average during summer months,” while “power from natural-gas
plants went for $35 a mega-watt hour on average in California’s
wholesale market.”

On the same day, SunEdison’s troubles worsened. After the company
acquired stimulus-funded First Wind last year, it became “the leading
renewable energy developer in the world.” Now, its “mounting financial
woes” resulted in another delay to the filing of its annual reports. The
company’s stock, according to WSJ, has “lost 67 percent over the past
three months and 91 percent over the past year.” It “slid another 16
percent to $1.73 in premarket trading.”

The next day, March 17, the New York Times declared that Abengoa, the
Spanish company hailed as “the world leader in a technology known as
solar thermal, with operations from Algeria to Latin America” has gone
from “industry darling to financial invalid.” I’ve written repeatedly on
Abenoga—which is on the verge of becoming “the largest bankruptcy in
Spanish corporate history.” Note: Abengoa was the second largest
recipient of U.S. taxpayer dollars—more than $3 billion—from the green
energy portion of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package.

It appears Clinton’s energy policies are aimed at trying to make winners
out of losers. How can she help it? That is what the Democrat Party is
trying to do with her.

Hopefully, voters know better. But then, as the University of Chicago’s
study’s closing words remind us: “hope is too infrequently a successful
strategy.”

A new study concludes that California could face more drought and extremely dry years

Indeed it could. Much of CA is basically a desert climate

For three years, an area of atmospheric high pressure dubbed the
“Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” parked itself off the West Coast, keeping
California hot and dry for month after month and helping to usher in
one of the worst droughts in the state’s history.

Patterns similar to the ridge are happening more often now than they
used to, a new study published Friday finds, suggesting a shift toward
more extreme dry years and an increased risk of drought in California.

Stanford University PhD candidate Daniel Swain and his colleagues looked
at patterns of high and low pressure over the Northeast Pacific and
western U.S. during the October to May wet season from 1949 to 2015.
They compared the patterns from the top five driest, wettest, warmest,
and coldest years to those from all the other years in the record to see
if they have tended to pop up more or less frequently over time.

While the patterns of high and low pressure from the wettest years
didn’t show a significant change, the pattern of persistent high
pressure ridges associated with the driest years happened more
frequently in recent decades than in earlier ones, the team found.

That finding, detailed in the journal Science Advances, fits with the
conclusions of an earlier study by Swain and his colleagues that
suggested such persistent ridging was more likely to occur in a world
with human-caused warming than one without it. The new study, however,
doesn’t ascribe a cause to the apparent trend — Swain said that will be
the subject of future work.

Having a ridge system stubbornly hanging around off the West Coast can
be a major deal for California, which often depends on just one or two
big storms to supply the bulk of its water and snowpack for the year.
The ridge blocks those storms and shunts them farther northward, as it
has over recent winters.

The patterns for dry years were more variable than those for the wet
years, though most featured a persistent ridge somewhere along the West
Coast.

“This finding suggests to me that California, because of it’s location
relative to the average position and typical wanderings of the Pacific
storm track, can get a dry year in multiple different ways,” Nate
Mantua, a climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration who wasn’t involved with the study, said in an email.
This jibes with the fact that the ridging during the most recent drought
also shifted in position, he said.

Because the study only deals with trends found in past observations, it
can’t predict with certainty that such a trend will continue into the
future. Mantua noted that it could simply be a sign of the variations of
the climate that can happen naturally over decades.

But if it does continue, that could mean “that maybe we should be experiencing this increase in variability,” Swain said.

"What seems to be happening is that we're having fewer 'average' years,
and instead we're seeing more extremes on both sides," Swain said in a
statement. " "This means that California is indeed experiencing more
warm and dry periods, punctuated by wet conditions."

Chris Funk, a climatologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and U.C.
Santa Barbara who also was not involved in the study, noted that other
work has also suggested this could be the case for California.

So while precipitation in California overall may not decline — climate
models, in fact, suggest that it may increase, because a warmer
atmosphere makes more moisture available to storms — the area could see a
greater tendency toward drought because there could be more “bust”
years.

Swain said that his team's study shows that focusing on how the average,
or mean, climate is changing could miss impactful changes, since
looking at the average for California would suggest an overall, if
slight, tendency to become wetter.

“We need to be considering the extremes in addition to changes in the mean,” he said.

Australia: March temperatures sets record as hottest ever, Bureau of Meteorology says

As Australia is in the South Pacific, it is a bullseye for El Nino --
and this is a strong El Nino that demonstrably pushed up 2015 temps up
all by itself. CO2 levels were static (they just oscillated around
400ppm) for the whole of 2015 according to Mauna Loa. So
the caution expressed below is commendable: "Climate change is thought
to be adding to the unusual heat". No harm in thinking

You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one.

Information released by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) indicated it was
the hottest March on record, reaching 1.7 degrees Celsius above the
long-term average.

This eclipsed the 1986 record of 1.67 degrees above the average, BoM said in its monthly climate report.

The unusual heat was particularly noticed in the Top End, where the failure of the monsoon allowed temperatures to creep up.

This, coupled with a high pressure system off the east coast of
Australia, caused a heatwave strong enough to prompt BoM to issue a
special climate statement about the phenomenon.

March 2 became Australia's hottest day on record. Averaged across the country, it reached a top of 38 degrees Celsius.

There was no relief overnight either with minimum overnight temperatures
the warmest ever, smashing the 1983 record by 0.83 degrees.

The hot March came on the back of the hottest February globally, and the hottest year for 2015.

A strong El Nino weather pattern prevailed at the start of the year,
which has traditionally been associated with hotter weather.
Although the El Nino is weakening, the heat effects are expected to
persist for a few more months.

Climate change is thought to be adding to the unusual heat.

The scorching start to 2016 prompted Australia's chief scientist Alan
Finkel to warn that the world was "losing the battle" against climate
change.

So the mine has now received both State and Federal approval --
to the frustration of the Greenies. Greenies have an instinctive
hatred of ALL mines. Rationality seems to play no part in
that. They want EVERYTHING to remain untouched, including the
ground underneath our feet

The Queensland government has granted three mining leases for Adani's
multi-billion dollar Carmichael coal mine, which will be the largest in
Australia.

Green groups say the mine will fuel global warming and compound threats
to the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef, amid one of its worst
coral bleaching events on record.

The premier put the value of the project at $21.7 billion and says the
approvals mean thousands of new jobs are now a step closer to reality.

Ms Palaszczuk said the move marked a new era of the resources sector.

'Today is a very significant step because it demonstrates my
government's 100 per cent committment to creating jobs across Queensland
and jobs in regional Queensland,' she said.

'What we have been experiencing here especially here in central
Queensland and the northern parts of our state, has been a downturn in
the mining community.'

Earlier today, the Australian Conservation Foundation questioned whether
Adani had pressured the mines minister to abandon his stated concerns
about granting mining licences before court challenges had concluded.

Adani said the approvals meant it could proceed to the next stage of
development but acknowledged ongoing uncertainty from unresolved legal
challenges 'by politically-motivated activists'.

It said a final investment decision would not be made until the court
challenges were resolved, and it had secured the final approvals it
needs.

'Having previously sought to progress to the construction phase in 2015,
Adani is keenly aware of the risks of proceeding on major works in
advance of the conclusion of these matters,' the company said in a
statement.

It also took a swipe at processes it said had held up a very significant project for Australia.

'The granting of the mining lease, coupled with strict and rigorous
science-based environmental approvals, underlines the importance of
major projects in Queensland, and in Australia more broadly, not being
subject to endless red tape, after approving authorities have
exhaustively examined them over some six years.'

The shriek is below complete with all the wrong and stupid Warmist assumptions we have heard so often

It was all over the news in India. The Indian finance minister Arun
Jaitley would be meeting Future Fund chairman Peter Costello to discuss
using the Fund to help finance Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. There was
no announcement of the meeting in Australia, but the questions must be
asked: how should Australia’s sovereign wealth fund be used, and should
it, a “future” fund, be considering the energy projects of the past?

The prospect of Costello dedicating sovereign funds to the massive coal
mine in the Galilee Basin is so misguided. Future energy investment lies
in renewables, not coal, and this trend is already playing out
worldwide. The Australian economy already runs a real risk of becoming
fossilised, caught in the past and missing out on the huge investment
market in renewable energy as the world inevitably decarbonises and
shifts to a zero emissions economy.

This global transition to renewables is an unavoidable condition for
containing global warming below 2C. The future is renewables, the past
is coal, and the economic benefits are easy to highlight.

In this transition, Australia stands to attract a major portion of the
$2.3tn annual trade value from emissions-intensive trade-exposed
industries, like cement, steel, and aluminium. In this era, countries
with abundant, cheap, high quality renewable energy will attract these
industries.

The Renewable Energy Superpower report to be released in Sydney on
Monday 4 April shows that Australia is consistently in the global top
three of countries with economic wind and solar energy resources,
whether based on energy production potential per square kilometre,
energy production potential from total land area, energy production
potential from un-utilised land area, or energy production potential
from rural land area.

Under various scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency for
their World Energy Outlook, investment in renewables and energy
efficiency will make up around half of the future investment in energy
in the next two decades, with investment in coal only making up 1-2%.

Whichever scenario the IEA looks at, renewables and energy efficiency
attracts more investment in the next two decades than coal, oil and gas
combined. Some $28tn is expected to be invested globally in renewable
energy and energy efficiency by 2035.

Investment in renewables and energy efficiency globally is already large
– around US$390bn is estimated to have been invested in 2013 alone,
according to the International Energy Agency. In order to contain global
warming to the 2C, the IEA estimates the annual investment in this
market to more than double by 2020 to around US$750bn annually, and then
to grow exponentially to US$2,300bn annually by 2035.

It also estimates that the renewables dominated power sector and energy
efficiency markets will be 20-40 times the value of future coal sector
development. The other important point that is relevant to Australia is
that power sector and energy efficiency investment is skewed towards
Australia’s neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region (40%) compared to
global fossil energy investment (25%).

So how large is Australia’s renewable energy resource? While it is
widely accepted that the total renewable energy resource across
Australia is significant, the Superpower report conservatively models
only the solar and wind resource that is available within 10kms of
Australia’s existing electricity grid and able to generate power at a
price competitive with other new power stations.

This is the resource that is immediately available to the existing
electricity grid. The results are staggering even when only this small
portion of Australia’s total renewable energy resource is captured – it
is equivalent to 5000 exajoules, enough to power the world for 10 years.

Put another way, this solar and wind resource is greater than Australia’s coal, oil, gas and nuclear resources combined.

Many proponents of fossil fuels argue that there are enough fossil fuels
to power the world for hundreds of years, that coal is cheaper and is
good for humanity. These arguments ignore the reality that burning
fossil fuels is incompatible with meeting the globally agreed goal of
limiting warming to 2C, that new renewables are cheaper than new coal
and new gas, and that many developing countries want solar.

In the decarbonised world in which we are heading, Australia will be a
renewable energy superpower if it plays its investment cards right. If
we are serious about our Future Fund funding the future for all
Australians, it is renewables – not coal – where the investments must be
made.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

4 April, 2016

Mauna Loa CO2

The Mauna Loa CO2 record
seems to be the one most referred to by Warmists so I have for some
time been greatly amused by what it shows for 2015, that "record" year
for warming, according to Warmists. It is so amusing that I think
there is a fair chance that it will be "adjusted" -- as the temperature
record often has been. So I have decided to take a screen capture
of it while it is in its original state. See below.

The 4th column is the actual average CO2 level in ppm. As you can
see, the actual CO2 levels just bobbed up and down around 400ppm,
showing that CO2 levels plateaued during that year. There was no
overall change. There were slight increases but also slight
decreases.

So it is perfectly clear that this "warmest" year was NOT caused by
anthropogenic CO2 emissions rising -- because total CO2 levels did not
rise. ALL the warming was due to natural factors, principally El
Nino.

Instead of crowing that it proved their theory, Warmists should be in
deep despond that this "warmest" year was TOTALLY natural. CO2
levels did nothing. Once again, there was no linkage between
temperature and CO2 levels. The facts are totally at odds with
Warmism.

Petard in Warmist calls for a RICO investigation of companies

Exxon is particularly targeted as conspiring to hush up global
warming information but other companies and groups could be dragged
in. A reader -- below -- is a bit amused at the whole idea

The Rico Act works both ways. Do the Green/Left not realize that false
science perpetrated to promote a Climate Change Agenda is also a
conspiracy that should be prosecuted equally. After all there seems to
be more actual evidence that monkeying with data and distorted graphs
and bogus models supported by non scientist is a bigger conspiracy than
any corporate effort.

ExxonMobil is not really concerned that Wind and Solar will put them out
of business anytime in the foreseeable future. The world is on a fossil
fuel diet and nothing is going to change that as long as there are
people who want to live warm, cool, mobile, watching TV, eating healthy
in comfortable homes with all of the luxury that we can get.

The world leaders will always be the countries with the most cheap
energy........USA, Russia, Australia,Canada and a few others.

The Pause Update: March 2016 (Preliminary)

Industrious Australian graph-maker, Ken Stewart, has launched another
banderilla at the Warmists -- below. Probably because of the
distortion caused by the El Nino phenomenon, Lord Monckton seems to have
desisted from updating his graph of satellite temperatures -- probably
until the La Nina cuts in later this year. So Ken fills a
gap. His approach is quite different from Monckton's but is still
very informative. I reproduce below only his graph for the globe
as a whole. See the original for full details

Well my last post certainly stirred up some Global Warming Enthusiasts
who found it difficult to get their heads around the continued existence
of The Pause. What will they make of this month’s update?
The Pause refuses to go away, despite greatly exaggerated rumours of its
death.

Dr Roy Spencer has just released UAH v6.0 data for March. This is a
preliminary post with graphs only for the Globe, the Northern
Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Tropics. Other
regions will be updated in a few days’ time when the full data for March
are released. (These preliminary figures may change slightly as
well.)

These graphs show the furthest back one can go to show a zero or
negative trend (less than +0.1C/ 100 years) in lower tropospheric
temperatures. I calculate 12 month running means to
remove the small possibility of seasonal autocorrelation in the monthly
anomalies. Note: The satellite record commences in December 1978-
now 37 years and 4 months long- 448 months. 12 month running means
commence in November 1979. The graphs below start in December
1978, so the vertical gridlines denote Decembers. The final
plotted points are March 2016.

Except for the Tropics, where The Pause has reduced by three months, in other regions it has remained at the same length.

Globe:

Mar 16 globe

Sorry, GWEs, The Pause is still an embarrassing reality! For how much longer we don’t know.

And, for the special benefit of those who think that I am deliberately
fudging data by using 12 month running means, here is the plot of
monthly anomalies, which shows that The Pause is over in monthly
anomalies by my rather strict criterion:

I will continue posting these figures showing these scarey trends from
monthly anomalies. The Pause will return sooner with monthly
anomalies than 12 month means of course. Meanwhile, shudder at the
thought of 18 years and 4 months with a frightening trend of +0.15C
+/-0.1C per 100 years.

The Northern Hemisphere Pause refuses to go quietly and remains at
nearly half the record. It may well disappear in the next month or
two.

For well over half the record the Southern Hemisphere has zero trend.

Mar 16 Tropics: The Pause has shortened by three months, but is still well over half the record long.

In a few days the full dataset will be released and graphs for the other regions will be plotted as soon as possible.

The starting place for compiling this list were the “blogrolls” or
“links” sections of the better known climate-sceptical and/or
enviro-critical websites. Many of the websites listed there have
blogrolls of their own, which were also surveyed. Overall, about 100
such lists were perused. Only websites appearing on these lists were
selected for the list below.

About 20 blogrolls contain over 100 entries each but there is a lot
overlapping content. Moreover, the lists tend to be poorly maintained
and thus include many broken links and dud sites. They also include
websites with little enviro-content.

The Lord Monckton Foundation website has an impressive 300 hyperlinks,
but over half of these link not to websites but to individual articles,
papers, and data-sets, or to pro-global warming sites including one that
calls Lord Moncton a “purple crested crackpot.” In fairness to Lord
Monckton, he is not advertising his list as being exclusively a roll
call of enviro-critical/climate-sceptical sites. Only about 70 of his
entries fit this definition, which still makes it one of the longest
such lists on the Internet.

U Climate is a noble effort to produce a universal climate website
collection. The site claims to draw postings from 150 climate sites but
actually seems to draw from about 100. Of its 52 skeptical sites, 2 are
not sceptical. Nevertheless, U Climate is a great idea and a site worth
visiting.

None of the lists perused contain over 90 currently-active,
enviro-critical/climate-sceptical websites. The list below is four times
longer than any other. This reflects a community that really does not
know itself.

True, the list below could be pared back. It includes multiple projects
that trace to common sources. For instance, four websites are produced
by the Center for Organizational Research and Education; however, in
this and other instances, each website is a stand-alone,
semi-independent project and thus appears as a separate entry. In other
cases where multiple websites replicate a single source, only the
presumed master site is listed.

A greater quandary is the dormant website. The exemplar of this
phenomenon is World Climate Report. This seminal website is the most
common resident on sceptics’ lists despite being dormant since 2012.
Regarding the list below, if a website has not had a fresh posting since
2013, it was usually struck. Applying this rule excluded several dozen
websites that appear regularly on sceptics’ lists.

A still greater quandary relates to websites whose enviro-critical
information constitutes only a small portion of the website’s overall
content. While no strict cut-off line was drawn, this concern excluded
scores of websites.

On the other hand, the ultimate list of
climate-sceptical/enviro-critical websites is probably over ten times
longer than the one offered below. The reasons for this are:

While almost all websites listed below hail from the English-speaking
world, the list does contain entries from Germany, Norway, Sweden,
France, Italy, South Africa, India, Argentina, Venezuela, etc. The
Internet’s limited robot translation services renders sleuthing about in
foreign languages problematic. Deeper investigation would no doubt
generate many more entries. The Eco Tretas site alone links to 27
Portuguese eco-sceptical sites.

Scores of the websites listed below issue forth from the libertarian
fountainhead. Libertarians oppose government intervention into the
market, and such intervention is precisely what environmentalists aim to
increase. There are many libertarian websites. The Atlas Economic
Research Foundation alone founded 400 libertarian think-tanks across 80
countries. While many libertarian sites are listed below, a full
inventory of such sites, even winnowed to those with significant
environmental commentary, was beyond the scope of this project.

Similar to the previous point, there exist a large number
pro-free-enterprise, limited-government, traditional-values, and/or
classical-liberal pressure groups and webzines, each with a substantial
Internet presence. Such groups lack the doctrinal purity of outright
libertarians and tend to focus on practical political problems.
Nevertheless, they all resist environmentalism. The State Policy Network
is a coalition of 130 said groups. The Federalist Society has 75
chapters and other offshoots. Only a few representatives of this genre
appear on the list below. As well, many Tea Party groups are not listed
but could be.

Several of the listed sites are part of a little-known, grassroots
groundswell opposing wind power – i.e. the form of electrical generation
most favoured by climate activists. The European Platform Against
Windfarms has 957 member organizations. The North American Platform
Against Wind Power links to 120 supporting organizations but includes
few from the 50-member Ontario Wind Resistance. Across the globe at
least 1,500 structured organizations oppose wind power. One problem here
is that some of these organizations are green NIMBY groups sporting
names like Forest Ecology Network and Save Our Lakes.

While the list below includes a few mainstream media pundits and
journalists, as a general rule such persons are not included. Celebs
often do not have independent websites and are only contactable through
their overlords and hence are incommunicado. Nevertheless, Tom Stossel,
Rush Limbaugh, and about 40 others rightly belong on this list.

This list does not include any of the hundreds of associations
representing the oil, gas, nuclear, coal, pipeline, forestry, fishing,
construction, and mining industries. Too often such groups espouse an
appeasing Corporate Social Responsibility line. The problem is not, as
the enviros allege, that big industrial firms lavish funds onto the
enviro-counter movement. The problem is that they are not spending
enough to ensure their own survival.

About 150 of the entries below are for simple blogs, meaning “web-logs”
of individuals unconnected to any larger, funding agencies. Some blogs
have blossomed into substantial enterprises. Jo Nova was selected top
Australian blog in 2014 after receiving 600,000 hits. This website
launched The Sceptic’s Handbook (Volumes 1 and 2), 200,000 copies of
which have been distributed. Watts Up With That is the clear champion in
this regard. Its 263 million cumulative hits have earned it numerous
Internet awards.

Jeff Id relays how in the heyday of the Climate Gate scandal his blog
(The Air Vent) peaked at 15,000 hits a day but has since quieted down,
in part due to his own divided efforts. Real Science’s producer openly
bemoans his inability to attract funders for his site. The Climate
Scepticism initiative was launched because its producer felt the climate
blogosphere was getting so crowded individual bloggers could no longer
maintain visibility. So far this coalition project has attracted seven
“sceptics” – two of whom are too sketchy to make it onto the list below.

Dozens of the website producers have hard copy books on the market and
several websites are entirely devoted to advertising recently published
books. Presumably all bloggers would welcome greater success in the
conventional publishing and media realms, but obscure sites such as
Green Corruption Files and No Tricks Zone often make for the most
interesting reading.

A New Car Will Cost You at Least $3,800 Extra Because of Government Regulation

When Congress and the Obama administration passed and implemented
extremely strict fuel economy regulations, the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) claimed that it would save consumers a few thousand dollars
on gas and add only $948 to the price of a new car.

The most modest of the independent estimates works out to $3,800 per
vehicle, even after the fuel savings are taken into account.

Three teams of independent economists and engineers went up against the
EPA’s analysts—finding much larger costs and smaller benefits. The most
modest of the independent estimates works out to $3,800 per vehicle,
even after the fuel savings are taken into account.

So whose predictions were more accurate?

Although we don’t know how prices would have changed if regulations had
been left alone, there are several trends that all moved together before
the law was changed in 2007.

The price index for vehicles (adjusted for quality improvements),
published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, had been falling steadily
since the 1990s.

The prices of other large consumer goods—“furnishings and durable
household equipment”—had been falling even longer, as modern
manufacturing and trade made things like dishwashers and sofas cheaper.

Prices for vehicles had been falling at about the same rate in the U.K., Australia, and Canada.

So what happened? Several of these trends showed turbulence during the
2008-2009 global crisis but then resumed their downward paths. The
exceptions were car prices in the U.S. and Canada, which enacted similar
new, more stringent fuel economy standards.

In a recently released Heritage Foundation research paper, we’ve
compared the recent price trends to the scholarly predictions and found
that if U.S. vehicle prices had followed one of the comparable trends,
cars would be between $3,975 and $7,140 cheaper today than they are.
This massive expense buys very little change in global warming: less
than two hundredths of a degree, according to the Obama administration’s
own estimate.

Congress should scrap Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards
entirely—they cost consumers dearly while having a negligible impact on
carbon emissions. Failing that, a new administration can freeze the
standards at 2016 levels to prevent the Corporate Average Fuel Economy
tax from doubling by 2025, as the Obama administration has planned.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

3 April, 2016

Warmist fear of the truth

I won't go into details but I had an email conversation a few weeks ago
with a woman whom I had last seen in the '70s. I had a small item
that she wanted so I suggested that she call in to pick it up. She
lives only about 15 minutes drive away so that would be no
burden. And she seemed keen to do that.

As part of polite catching up she asked me about my mathematician
son. One of the things I said was that he was like me in regarding
global warming as absurd to the point of hilarity.

Since I had last seen her, however, she had become a global warming
believer. So I said that when she visited I would like to show her
a graph. I had in mind the graph at the head of this blog.

We closed the conversation shortly thereafter and I have heard and seen
neither hide nor hair of her since. Her interest in visiting me
vanished as soon as she suspected that her beliefs would come under
challenge.

And when they can't shut us up, that is what the Green/Left do.
They run away. They HAVE to feel wiser than the rest of us
"cattle" in order to prop up their self-esteem. ANYTHING is better
than feeling small and foolish, which is what they mostly are. So when
conservatives present evidence to show that their wisdom is wrong, it is
very distressing to them. They just HAVE to shut all that
out. Sad.

CEI attorney cites chilling effect of state investigations of ExxonMobil

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is investigating
ExxonMobil for possibly suppressing climate change research from the
public and investors, is overstepping his bounds, a senior attorney for
the Competitive Enterprise Institute contends.

Schneiderman has said he is not pleased that ExxonMobil questions the
impact of global warming and that it donates to think tanks that
occasionally challenge conventional wisdom.

“If you can intimidate people who take issue with the most alarming and
maximal projections of global warming,” said Hans Bader, senior attorney
for CEI in Washington, D.C., “you will end up with a skewed estimate of
global warming that may also skew public policy and result in
misallocation of resources.”

Schneiderman specifically disagreed with comments by Exxon that
“switching over to renewables by the end of this century would raise
energy costs” substantially, and that “ExxonMobil essentially ruled out
the possibility that governments would adopt climate policies stringent
enough to force it to leave its reserves in the ground," saying that
rising population and global energy demand would prevent that. “Meeting
these needs will require all economic energy sources, especially oil and
natural gas,” it added.

Bader believes that the objective of the attorney general's
investigation is not to uncover wrongdoing but rather to harass Exxon by
subjecting it to bad publicity and the costs of producing thousands of
pages of documents.

"I suspect that what is meant by 'promulgating misleading information,'
is that oil companies declined to predict massive increases in
temperature over the last 20 years that did not come true, and did not
in fact occur," he said. "Failure to embrace exaggerated claims of
global warming does not constitute '`deliberate deception,' when
scientists have come up with widely varying estimates of how the climate
will change, some conservative, and some exaggerated.

"Since climate-change predictions are not an exact science, the fact
that one scientist comes up with a maximal, upper-bound projection of
climate change does not obligate an oil company to believe it, much less
trumpet it to the public. Nor does the fact that an oil company, which
hedges against risk (including the risk of relatively improbable events,
such as maximal, upper-bound projections of global temperature
increases), takes such an estimate into account for contingency-planning
mean that it accepts that estimate as being likely to come true, and
thus render it deceitful for failure to publicly trumpet that projection
of warming as if it were likely to come true."

Bader believes Schneiderman's investigation is part of a pattern of
targeting individuals and groups with differing opinions about climate
change.

"They are apparently aimed at people who are in the mainstream of
climatology, who simply have a somewhat lower projection of global
temperature increases than liberal state attorneys general find
politically convenient," he said.

"For example, University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy was
the target of liberal Congressional investigators, even though Christy
doesn’t say global warming isn’t happening; and the brief he
co-submitted to the Supreme Court says it is happening, but at less than
half the rate projected by many other climate scientists."

Freedom of speech is the core issue for Bader.

"The First Amendment has long been interpreted as protecting corporate
lobbying and donations, even to groups that allegedly deceive the public
about important issues," he said. "So even if being a 'climate denier'
were a crime (rather than constitutionally protected speech, as it in
fact is), a donation to a non-profit that employs such a person would
not be."

But Bader expects other states to take similar action.

"Maryland is and its attorney general has already prejudged matters by
claiming that oil companies have contributed to the problem by
intentionally promulgating misleading information, testimony and
advertising," he said.

The ultimate victim, Bader argues, is freedom of expression.

"These investigations are a threat to mainstream climatologists who do
not make exaggerated claims of global warming," he said, "and a threat
to oil companies’ ability to engage in prudent contingency planning that
takes into account maximal projections of global warming, without
having to publicly tout those projections, which often turn out to be
inaccurate years later."

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday for a potentially
landmark legal case limiting the reach of the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers and its zealous interpretation of the Clean Water Act. U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co revolves around a peat farm
operated by the Pierce family near the North Dakota-Minnesota state
line. The Pierces drain bogs and scrape up the peat to sell to golf
courses and football stadiums. As Kevin Pierce explained in a video,
laying down peat creates a cushion on swaths of grass that will
experience heavy use. It also reduces the amount of water it takes to
hydrate said grass.

When the company tried to use a property in nearby Minnesota for its
peat-harvesting operation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers swooped in.
Bogs are wetlands, wetlands feed into navigable waterways, and
therefore, the Pierce’s peat bog was under the corps' purview because it
somehow affected the Red River, which lies 120 miles away. Sure, the
Corps has jurisdiction over navigable waterways in the United States,
but good luck piloting a boat through a peat bog. Recently, the Corps
and the EPA tried to extend their power so that they control bodies of
water as small as a ditch. The Pierces were yet another family affected
by agency overreach.

But there was little they could do. They could cave to the Corps'
demands, they could navigate the red tape and apply for a costly permit,
or they could use the property anyway and risk major fines. The Pierces
couldn’t take the Corps to court to challenge its determination, so the
Supreme Court will decide whether the Corps is above legal challenge.

During the oral arguments, both liberal and conservative justices
expressed skepticism over the Corps' arguments. For example, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the permitting process “arduous and very
expensive.” The Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the
Pierces before SCOTUS, say the amicus briefs from think tanks,
businesses — even 29 states — have joined the Pierces' petition to the
Supreme Court, none in support of the Corps. It seems this part of the
environmental regulatory deluge is coming to an end.

Much debate and controversy surrounds the historic treatment of Native
American communities by the U.S. Government. There exists many
federal programs specifically aimed at helping tribal communities.
Certainly government policies and programs should not hurt them.
However, the Administration’s new carbon emission reduction regulation
does just that.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed a temporary reprieve to the
states by granting a stay of Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed
controversial carbon emissions rule, there is no doubt that as written,
the president’s so-called Clean Power Plan impacts low and middle income
communities the most, and especially singles out certain Indian
nations.

The EPA has gone as far as to issue a supplemental proposal to address
carbon emissions from the four electric generating stations located on
Indian lands. These plants produce low cost electricity for sale into
the grid, as well as, provide well-paying jobs for tribal
communities. In the case of the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) in
Arizona, the plant was established specifically to pump water from the
Colorado River, under an existing water rights settlement, to areas on
and off the reservation. Additionally, the NGS utilizes coal mined
on the reservation.

Unfortunately, the Navajo Nation, like too many other tribal
communities, is plagued by significant economic challenges. The
lack of jobs, high unemployment, and limited opportunities hurt the
young and old alike. The EPA’s actions will directly impact one of
the tribe’s most significant employers, and will have an economic
ripple affect across the reservation.

The 27,000 square mile Navajo Nation extends into the states of Utah,
Arizona and New Mexico, and is larger than 10 of the 50 states in
America. Many Americans remember the heroic and patriotic acts of
the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II in the Pacific.

Arizona State Sen. Carlyle Begay, a Navajo recently said, “The Navajo
Nation’s unemployment rate is over 50 percent. Currently, revenue
from coal represents 60 percent of the Navajo Nation’s general funds and
operating budget. Absent political restrictions on the use of coal,
(coal) mining and the Navajo Generating Station on the Navajo Nation’s
land would be expected to boost its economy by over $13 billion over the
next 25 years!”

Employing nearly 500 people, the NGS plays a key role in improving the
quality of life for residents of the Navajo Nation and surrounding
cities. The Kayenta Mine, which supplies coal to NGS, employs more
than 400 employees. These facilities provide hundreds of Navajos with
the opportunity to work. Like many corporate citizens, the NGS
contributes to the quality of life in the region through targeted
investments and grants to support educational scholarships, historic
preservation, and environmental protection.

As part of the Salt River Project (SRP), the NGS not only provides
electricity for consumers and businesses, but it provides the power
needed to distribute water throughout the region. SRP's water
business is one of the largest raw-water suppliers in Arizona delivering
approximately 800,000 acre-feet of water annually to a 375-square-mile
service area.

The impact of the Clean Power Plan on the Navajo Nation is not
insignificant and will impact them for generations. These proud
and patriotic people deserve better.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has produced a compelling video -- in
the Navajo’s own words -- that illustrate how the EPA’s plan impacts
Navajo lives.

“Another one gone,” began the Lost Coast Outpost’s report in late
January. A.A. “Red” Emmerson, chairman of Sierra Pacific Industries,
announced the permanent closure of its sawmill on Samoa Peninsula in
Arcata, California – with the loss of 123 crew member jobs (and over 100
secondary jobs that depended on sawmill employment).

Regulatory burdens and reduced allowable harvests from federal forests are the primary reasons for the closure, Emmerson said.

The shutdown of the last mill on once-bustling Humboldt Bay this year
was just the latest loss in the timber industry’s long and steady
decline under relentless environmentalist pressure and U.S. Forest
Service complicity.

A year earlier the North Coast Journal had sadly bid “Goodnight, Korbel”
when Arcata’s neighbor lost its 131-year-old sawmill, its 106 direct
jobs and numerous local indirect positions. The Pulp & Paperworkers’
Resource Council had previously released its 119-page “Mill
Curtailments & Closures From 1990,” counting more than 1,700
nationwide timber-related casualties from 1990 through 2012.

All this damage was launched by the ionic 1991 Spotted Owl court ruling
won by a local bird group, Seattle Audubon Society – initially with
separate plaintiff Portland (Oregon) Audubon Society – against logging
in Washington, Oregon and California.

The owl ruling has been so devastating because Judge William L. Dwyer,
of Washington State’s federal district court, granted and stretched
Seattle Audubon’s demands to the impossible.

Using the “regional biogeography” principle from a federal “Spotted Owl
Task Force” decision, Dywer ruled, “The duty to maintain viable
populations of existing vertebrate species requires planning for the
entire biological community – not for one species alone. It is distinct
from the duty, under the Endangered Species Act, to save a listed
species from extinction.”

But even wildlife specialists did not know and could not explain what
the “entire biological community” of the three-state area was.

Industry analyst Paul Ehinger & Associates of Eugene, Oregon found
that, after just five years, Dwyer’s Seattle Audubon ruling had shut
down 187 mills and wiped out 22,654 jobs throughout the three states.

The toll expanded like the Big Bang, and running totals are no longer
tracked. A few well-off Seattle industry-haters and a liberal judge who
paid little attention to the human toll set in motion a curse without
end, the “progressive” destruction of the jobs, incomes, hopes and
dreams of thousands.

The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona is a legal action
environmental group that sues to block human action and doesn’t care
who gets hurt. The leader of its three co-founders, Kieran Suckling, had
been an activist in the 1980s’ vandalism and sabotage group, Earth
First! (The exclamation point was a mandatory identifier.)

Hatred of industry – and the people who ran it – prompted the founders
to seek ways to permanently stop natural resource use and led them to
form the CBD in 1994. With the help of environmental attorneys, CBD
“weaponized” the Endangered Species Act against ranchers, loggers,
miners, and human activity in general. That law now trumps virtually
everything else.

In fact, about the only time the act doesn’t seem to apply is when
gigantic wind turbines slaughter hundreds of thousands of eagles, hawks,
falcons, other birds and bats, year after year, nearly eradicating them
and “entire biological communities” across vast areas in California,
Oregon and elsewhere.

The organization’s self-description says, “As the country's leading
endangered species advocates, the Center for Biological Diversity works
through science, law and creative media to secure a future for all
species, great or small, hovering on the brink of extinction.”

Extremism is a mild term to describe CBD’s blanket enmity to human
action. It has even crossed the traditional environmentalist line that
protected and revered Native Americans as “people of nature.”

The group joined a federal lawsuit last year to block essential
expansion of The Navajo Mine, south of Farmington, New Mexico. The mine
sits on a Navajo reservation and is owned by the Navajo Transitional
Energy Company (NTEC), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Navajo Nation’s
sprawling tribal government.

The mine was established for the sole purpose of delivering all its coal
to the nearby Four Corners Power Plants: five coal-fired power plants,
majority-owned and operated by the Arizona Public Service Company, to
provide electricity to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

In the process, it generated 800 mine and power plant jobs, many of them
Navajos, and $40 million in annual revenue to the Navajo Nation. NTEC
was granted a federal permit to expand the mine.

However, the CBD was determined to stop the expansion and shut down the
mine via a huge lawsuit. It helped organize a coalition of co-plaintiffs
including little local groups such as Amigos Bravos, San Juan Citizens
Alliance, and Dine [Navajo] Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, as
well as the $100-million-a-year Sierra Club and the powerful Western
Environmental Law Center.

The attack by CBD et al. won a Colorado federal judge’s order nullifying
the expansion permit. The order was confirmed by the Tenth U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals when NTEC lost an appeal for a stay on the lower
court’s ruling. Even with that victory, the CBD gang insisted that
ongoing mining must also halt, pending a new environmental review of
alleged public health and environmental risks from the mine expansion:
from pollutants that are actually a minor problem at these
technologically advanced and well-run Navajo facilities.

Only the Navajo Nation’s sovereignty, an environmental review and
agreements with the EPA to fight regional haze by closing three of the
plant’s five units and installing emission controls on the remaining two
plants saved some of the jobs and revenue – for now. Of course, all
that could change as the CBD gang fights on, threatening to sue the
federal permitting agency.

Lost jobs of course mean seriously impaired living standards, health and
welfare for unemployed workers and their families. But for the CBD and
judges, those concerns are irrelevant.

In January, the Farmington Daily Times reported that the town’s San Juan
College received a $1.4 million federal grant to help retrain displaced
coal miners and workers in other industries, including oil and gas. But
oil and gas operations are also under assault by the CBD gang and
various federal agencies, which are using climate change, the EPA’s
Clean Power Plan and other regulations to restrict or eliminate leasing,
drilling and other resource extraction on western lands.

Clearly, even the sovereignty that comes with being a federally
recognized Indian tribe on an established reservation provides no
protection against a weaponized Endangered Species Act. Other
communities, industries, workers and families are even more powerless.

Once again, poor, minority and working class families are at the mercy
of wealthy ruling elites, for whom exaggerated and even fabricated
environmental concerns are paramount. It’s wrong, and it has to end.

Via email

Coal fightback in Australia

Grant Goldman

The Hunter Coal Festival starts today and runs until Sunday 10th of
April. Tomorrow Saturday I shall be in Singleton compering Family
Day which will be great. It is all free and everyone is welcome.

Coal is wonderful and is a gigantic contributor to our prosperity.
Unfortunately there are people with wicked motives who are waging war
on coal.

For the past five years there has been a continuous propaganda campaign
run internationally by the Greens and their allies against coal
generally and in particular against Indian Companies involved in the
coal industry. The campaign has also embraced a raft of spurious
lawsuits trying to destroy, damage or delay the plans of Adani and GVK
to become significant producers and exporters of Queensland Coal.

One of the catch cries of the villains is the theme “CAN’T EAT COAL”.
The truth is that coal is a huge contributor to the provision of food
worldwide. Without coal there would be No modern agriculture, No
tractors or harvesters, No trucks, No fertiliser, No pesticides or
herbicides, No refrigeration, No steel cans or bottles, No grain silos,
No efficient transportation, No modern irrigation, No scythes or spades,
No modern fishing fleets. Without coal most of the world’s
population would starve to death in the dark.

The enemies of coal are the enemies of 300 million people in India who
don’t even have a light bulb. These people want their children to be
able to study at night. They want to refrigerate food for themselves and
their families. The enemies of coal exhibit a strongly racist view that
these 300 million people should be deprived of the benefits of coal
because they are only Indians.

As one example of this wicked war on coal, in May 2015 a bunch calling
themselves “One Million Women” was operating a website which made this
false claim:

The Indian company Adani is in charge of the coal terminal at Abbot Point - This is expected to destroy our Great Barrier Reef.

The One Million Women Website on Monday 11 May 2015 was displaying a
photo of Sir Richard Branson and a headline asserting “Richard Branson
Lobbies UN to List Great Barrier Reef as ‘In Danger’”.

On a very large percentage of Virgin Australia flights in and out of
Brisbane Airport the passengers include men and women wearing
hi-visibility outfits. These are among the thousands of miners
whose purchasing power helps Queensland and the rest of Australia
prosper. Another useful piece of information is that Brisbane
Airport’s long overdue second runway now under construction has been
made possible by a dredging program involving the delivery of eleven
million cubic metres of sand sucked out of Moreton Bay. That is
nearly eighteen millions tonnes, and the massive dredging job was
finished in December 2014. So the founder of the Virgin group of
companies is happy to sell thousands of air tickets to the mining
industry and is happy to receive the benefit of dredging when it suits
him. I should mention that every concrete runway in the world has
depended upon coal or a coal substitute for the production of the
cement.

So what is the Australian Coal Industry doing to defend civilisation
against these unworthy attacks on coal? We know that the enemies
of coal deliberately tap into the ancient racist assumption that
everything that is black is somehow inferior, which you will admit puts
coal rather at a disadvantage.

So Australian Coal Industry scientists working with their Indian
Counterparts have developed a coal preparation process which at the
front end changes the colour of coal to GREEN. I have a lump
of this amazing green coal on my desk and I am posting a photograph of
this green coal on my website.

The good news is that green coal has all the calorific value of its
black ancestor. The only difference is the colour. Everyone loves
Kermit the Frog. The enemies of coal will have to find a different
target.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

1 April, 2016

Warmists now predicting the future 500 years from now

Ludicrous. They've yet to get a prophecy right. It's just fantasy

Predictions about rising sea levels were already pretty dire, but the
situation may have just got worse thanks to a climatological calculation
oversight.

Previous estimates of global sea level rises may have underestimated the
problem by half because they failed to incorporate the full effects of
factors including the break-up of ice sheets.

Scientists claim that earlier predictions about the next 100 years, made
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are wrong and
the actual rise could be around 5ft (1.5 metres).

Experts are warning that the oversight could prove disastrous for low
lying coastal cities, such as Miami in the US, or Guangzhou in China.

The stark warning comes from climate scientists Professor Robert DeConto
of the University of Massachusetts, and Dr David Pollard of
Pennsylvania State University, writing in the journal Nature.

Mechanisms that were previously known about, but never incorporated into
a computer model, radically changed the outcome of their projections.

DeConto and Pollard's study was motivated by reconstructions of past sea
level rises including the inter-glacial period around 125,000 years ago
and warm intervals, such as the Pliocene, around 3 million years ago.

High sea levels then, they said, imply that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to climate warming.

'In the past, when global average temperatures were only slightly warmer
than today, sea levels were much higher.' explained DeConto.

Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet can only explain a fraction of this,
and the rest must have been caused by retreat on Antarctica.

The scientists developed a new ice sheet climate model that includes
'previously under-appreciated processes' which emphasise the importance
of future atmospheric warming around Antarctica.

These include the effects of surface melt water on the break-up of ice shelves, and the collapse of vertical ice cliffs.

By focusing on the boundary between the ice and the seas - namely
glaciers and ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland - DeConto and
Pollard showed that instability of ice sheets and ice cliffs could be an
important contributor to past and future ice retreat, leading to
creeping sea levels.

They predict that Antarctica alone could contribute more than one metre
of sea-level rise by the year 2100, and greater than 50ft (15 metres) by
2500 if atmospheric emissions continue unabated.

In this scenario, atmospheric warming will become the dominant driver of ice loss, rather than ocean warming.

The new estimate includes the new processes in the 3D ice sheet model,
and was made by testing these against records of past high sea levels.

Scientists warn that, if substantial amounts of ice are lost, the long
'thermal memory' of the ocean will be curtailed and this will, in turn,
inhibit the ice sheet's recovery for thousands of years.

'Research has focused on the role of the ocean, melting floating ice
shelves from below. It is often overlooked that the major ice shelves in
the Ross and Weddell Seas are also vulnerable to atmospheric warming,'
the paper said.

'Today, summer temperatures are around 0?C (32?F) on many shelves, and
due to their flat surfaces near sea level, little atmospheric warming
would be needed to dramatically surface melting.'

Scientist was defunded for publishing inconvenient research results about CO2

Charles David Keeling (1928-2005) became famous for setting up a
worldwide network of CO2 measurement stations that demonstrated annual
increases of CO2 in the air. The iconic Keeling curve,
representing CO2 concentrations since 1958, is Exhibit One in every
climate-related presentation, and one of the very few accurate and
reliable datasets in climatology. Ralph Keeling, his son, is
continuing his work as CO2 Program Director in the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography, UCSD.

In September 2011 Ralph Keeling and his co-authors published results of
their research, showing that the biosphere absorbs carbon dioxide much
faster than was assumed in the IPCC texts. The article was very
technical and used non-confrontational language. A direct quote:

"Our analysis shows a rapid recovery from El Niño events, implying a
shorter cycling time of CO2 with respect to the terrestrial biosphere
and oceans than previously estimated. Our analysis suggests that current
estimates of global gross primary production, of 120 petagrams of
carbon per year, may be too low, and that a best guess of 150–175
petagrams of carbon per year better reflects the observed rapid cycling
of CO2. Although still tentative, such a revision would present a new
benchmark by which to evaluate global biospheric carbon cycling models"

This was a very significant result, because higher gross primary
production means higher net primary production and a higher CO2 sink
rate. What happened next was not surprising: the Obama
Administration defunded Keeling for these research results, because they
contradicted the climate alarmism line.

More precisely, the NSF defunded Keeling’s oxygen measurements even
before the publication, in 2009–2010, probably after learning about the
preliminary results. Other agencies joined the boycott later.

See Nature, November 2013, Budget crunch hits Keeling’s curves ?
Scientist struggles to maintain long-standing carbon dioxide record and
more recent atmospheric-oxygen monitor. This “budget crunch” was a
lie. The budgets of every research or study supporting or
appearing to support the alarm have been skyrocketing in the last 7
years. From the Nature’s article:

Late last month, officials at California’s Scripps Institution of
Oceanography turned to Twitter seeking donations to maintain the iconic
‘Keeling curve’, a 55-year record of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide
levels. …

The complement to the Keeling curve is Ralph Keeling’s atmospheric-oxygen record, which NOAA does not replicate. …

Keeling says that he received around US $700,000 annually for the CO2
programme through paired support from the National Science Foundation
(NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) until three years ago, when the
NSF halted funding. With staff cuts, he has been able to maintain
operations with a budget of around $350,000.

The NSF claims that it could not find $700,000 in its nearly $7 Billion
budget, a huge chunk of which was dedicated to climate studies. Their
pants must be on fire.

The primary target of the defunding was the oxygen isotopes record,
which allowed Keeling and colleagues to make those inconvenient
conclusions about the increased primary production. But CO2
measurements suffered as well. In particular, at least some CO2
samples were collected but not analyzed. Yes, the CO2 measurements
reported in 2011-2014 might have been of inferior quality, because the
scientific establishment was punishing Ralph Keeling for doing
inconvenient scientific research.

In the end, the Schmidt Foundation threw Keeling a few crumbs to
continue CO2 (but not O2) measurements, apparently on the condition that
he repent and participate in the alarmist propaganda. As announced on
the Scripps website, September 2014 (my emphasis):

WENDY AND ERIC SCHMIDT AWARD $500,000 GRANT TO KEELING CURVE

Supports continued operation of the iconic measurement series

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego today announced that
Wendy and Eric Schmidt have provided a grant that will support
continued operation of the renowned Keeling Curve measurement of
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The grant provides $500,000 over five
years to support the operations of the Scripps CO2 Group, which
maintains the Keeling Curve.

CO2 Group Director Ralph Keeling said the grant will make it possible
for his team to restore atmospheric measurements that had been
discontinued because of a lack of funding, address a three-year backlog
of samples that have been collected but not analyzed, and enhance
outreach efforts that educate the public about the role carbon dioxide
plays in climate.

A three-year backlog of samples! E pur si muove.

Recently, independent research has confirmed increased activity of the
biosphere as a carbon dioxide sink. Further, it became known that
IPCC has been intentionally misleading public about carbon cycle.

New York’s Democratic attorney general (AG) made a chilling suggestion
at an event he co-hosted this week: harsher penalties beyond fines for
groups allegedly misleading the public on global warming.

“Financial damages alone may be insufficient,” Eric Schneiderman said
during the event in New York City Tuesday. “The First Amendment does not
give you the right to commit fraud.”

It’s unclear if Schneiderman meant those “misleading” the public on
global warming should be thrown in jail or maybe just do community
service — though it’s doubtful community service would be more
“sufficient” than financial damages.

Schneiderman was joined by more than a dozen attorneys general from
Democratic states, some of whom promised to join New York in
investigating ExxonMobil for allegedly misleading the public about
global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore even showed up to
apparently show how serious state prosecutors are about the issue.

Schneiderman’s conference comes after the liberal AG launched an
investigation into whether or not Exxon was accurately portraying to
shareholders the risks global warming poses to the company’s operations.
The New York AG’s office recently settled a probe into Peabody Energy, a
coal company, for the same thing.

The investigation was prompted by reports by InsideClimate News and
Columbia University alleging Exxon was misleading the public about
global warming. The stories claim to show how Exxon knew oil production
would make global warming worse, but continued to conduct business and
fund groups skeptical of global warming regulations.

It would be more accurate to say that having an icebreaker sail ahead
makes the cruise possible. And even with that they are scared
stiff

This summer, the Crystal Cruises' Serenity — the largest passenger
cruise ship ever to attempt to navigate through the treacherous waters
of the famed Northwest Passage — will depart from Seward, Alaska on
August 16, bound for New York City via the top of North America.

The voyage is sold out, according to Paul Garcia, the chief spokesman for the cruise line.

“In terms of guest capacity, we would be the most guests to go through
the Arctic in one vessel,” Garcia told Mashable. He said there is
already "strong interest" in the planned 2017 cruise.

The Serenity's planned voyage presents significant challenges for search
and rescue agencies that would be tasked with responding to any
incidents at sea, particularly since the ship will be operating in
remote locations and in harsh weather conditions.

To make things more interesting, it will also be traversing relatively uncharted waters and ice-covered seas.

In terms of leisure travel, only small expeditions — like Quark
Expeditions and Polar Cruises — have taken on the Northwest Passage.

Companies like Crystal Cruises are taking the opportunity to pioneer
expeditions that would have been deemed impossible just a decade ago.
Until 2007, the Northwest Passage had never been considered ice-free in
all of human history.

On Monday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that
sea ice reached a record low wintertime extent after a bizarrely mild
winter affected nearly the entire Arctic. This could set up the sea ice
for a record melt in the summer, though this is not a guarantee.

Although Crystal Cruises, along with other companies, are intent on
navigating the passage for profit, it's not a given that the route will
be open for business even in milder-than-average summers.

The passage is unlike other maritime choke points like the Suez Canal or
Strait of Malacca. It is not a clearly marked channel, but rather a
loosely defined waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the
Pacific Ocean through North American Arctic waters. For example, the
Passage includes the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, which contains 36,000
islands.

Even though sea ice cover across the Arctic Ocean is dwindling
year-by-year, studies show there could still be enough sea ice present
in the Northwest Passage to render the route infeasible for reliable
navigation for another four decades.

A study published in 2015 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters,
for example, found considerable amounts of thick ice present in the
Northwest Passage, with cooler-than-average air temperatures compared to
other parts of the Arctic at that time.

As added insurance, the Serenity will be accompanied by an escort ship
that will have a helicopter on board to look for ice ahead of the ship's
course. This ship will also serve as an icebreaker.

Paul Garcia, director of public relations for Crystal Cruises, said the
escort vessel will be capable of clearing the way for Serenity if it
were to encounter significant ice floes.

“I can assure you it is a vessel that has the highest icebreaking
capabilities,” Garcia said about the escort ship, noting that the
contract for its use in 2016 has not yet been finalized.

“It is no stranger to the Arctic region," he said. “We’re taking all precautionary measures to make sure it is a safe voyage.”

There have already been several close calls involving passenger ships in
the Arctic. In 1996, the cruise ship Hanseatic ran aground in the
Simpson Strait, forcing an evacuation of 153 passengers.

In 2010, the vessel Clipper Adventurer ran aground in the Coronation
Gulf of the Northwest Passage with 118 passengers and 69 crew aboard. It
was rescued by a Canadian ice breaker which happened to be deployed
relatively close to the vessel at the time.

The Northwest Passage offers few easy options for safe passage of a
large ship like the Serenity. The so-called southern passage includes
several narrow, shallow waterways that pose dangers for large cruise
vessels, whereas the northern route, which tends to have more ice even
at the end of the summer melt season, is more suitable for larger ships.

According to NASA, the northern route was considered mostly ice-filled
for the sake of navigation during most of the 2015 melt season, despite
the southern route's mostly ice-free status.

The Crystal Serenity weighs 68,870 tons and is 820 feet long, making it a
challenge to navigate in the narrow, ice-choked waters that can be
found even at the end of the summer melt season in the region.

And Crystal Cruises is requiring all passengers to purchase at least
$50,000 in emergency evacuation repatriation insurance in order to
participate in the cruise, due to the high cost of medical evacuations
from Arctic waters.

The cruise company says it will be taking steps to minimize air and
water pollution during the voyage, and enhanced safety measures
including putting more trained personnel in ice avoidance techniques on
the ship's bridge.

In addition, the cruise line says it is putting two ice searchlights, a
high-resolution radar and other equipment on board the Serenity to
search for underwater obstructions or uncharted rocks. Maritime charts
in parts of the Arctic are considered to be unreliable because there
have been so few ships transiting that area before.

17 State Attorneys General Form Coalition 'to Protect and Expand’ Climate Change Agenda

Seventeen attorney generals from around the United States have formed a
coalition “to protect and expand progress the nation has made in
combating climate change” in a first of its kind partnership of law
enforcement officials.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced that he would be joining the coalition in a press release Tuesday.

“Attorneys General Eric Schneiderman of New York and William Sorrell of
Vermont co-sponsored the meeting, with attorneys general George Jepsen
of Connecticut, Brian E. Frosh of Maryland, Maura Healey of
Massachusetts, and Claude Walker of the US Virgin Islands in attendance,
along with former Vice President and leading climate activist Al Gore,
and representatives from a total of 17 state attorneys general offices,”
the release says.

"With gridlock and dysfunction gripping Washington on the
generation-defining issue of climate change, it is up to the states to
lead. We stand ready to defend the next president's climate change
agenda and vow to fight any efforts to roll-back the meaningful progress
we've made over the past eight years," said Attorney General
Schneiderman. "And our offices will begin working together on important
state-level initiatives, such as investigations into whether fossil fuel
companies are misleading their investors about how climate change will
impact their investments, fossil fuel companies, and our planet."

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh said, "Climate changes poses an
existential threat to Maryland and to (the) nation. I am proud to join
with my colleagues across the country in this important collaboration,
and am willing to use every tool at our collective disposal to protect
our air, our water and our natural resources. The pledge we are making
today can help insure a cleaner and safer future."

Today, the Commonwealth of Virginia filed a brief to the DC Circuit Court in support of the Clean Power Plan.

The Clean Power Plan is a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s
climate change agenda. It seeks a 32% reduction in carbon emissions from
the power sector nationwide by 2030. The U.S. Supreme Court has delayed
implementation while the D.C. Circuit court considers challenges.

As every 10-year-old who ever got a sweater for a birthday present has
been told, “it’s the thought that counts.” That seems to be the guiding
principle at the Department of Energy and the California Public
Utilities Commission when it comes to solar power.

The latest example is the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar thermal plant in
California. (Note: Solar thermal plants do not use solar panels to
directly convert sunshine to electricity; they use sunshine to boil
water that then drives conventional turbines.)

Here’s the story so far. Ivanpah…

is owned by Google, NRG Energy, and Brightsource, who have a market cap in excess of $500 billion.

received $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy.

is paid four to five times as much per megawatt-hour as natural gas-powered plants.

is paid two to three times as much per megawatt-hour as other solar power producers.

has burned thousands of birds to death.

has delayed loan repayments.

is seeking over $500 million in grants to help pay off the guaranteed loans.

burns natural gas for 4.5 hours each morning to get its mojo going.

Brightsource, which is privately held, is owned by a virtual who’s who
of those who don’t need subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers.

In spite of all this, Ivanpah has fallen woefully short of its
production targets. The managers’ explanation for why production came up
32 percent below expected output is the weather. In addition to raising
questions about planning for uncertainty, it is not all that clear how a
nine-percent drop in sunshine causes a 32-percent drop in production.

More bizarrely, the natural gas used to get the plant all warmed up and
ready each day would be enough to generate over one quarter of the power
actually produced from the solar energy. Sorry, let’s not be haters.

The problem for Ivanpah’s customers (California power utilities) is that
they planned on all those solar watt-hours to meet California’s
renewable power mandates, which require that renewables produce a large
and rising fraction of California’s electricity. That is why they pay so
much more for Ivanpah’s output than for conventionally powered
electricity.

Breaching their contracts with these California utilities threatened to
shut down Ivanpah. More likely than permanently shutting Ivanpah down
would have been a change of ownership at a price that came closer to
reflecting reality.

But this would have been bothersome for Ivanpah’s investors and the
Department of Energy’s ridiculous Section 1703 Loan Program, so the
California Public Utilities Commission saved the day (for the fat-cat
owners, of course, not for actual the electricity consumers) by granting
the company an extension to meet the production targets.

The best part of the ruling is the section on the cost—it’s pretty succinct.

Here it is in its entirety:

PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

But hey, Ivanpah’s plant is a shiny new technological marvel. That’s what counts, right?

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl
Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the
unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If
sugar is bad we are all dead

Global warming has now become a worldwide political gravy-train -- so
only a new ice-age could stop it. I am happy however to be one of the
small band who keep the flame of truth alive

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That
the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however
disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the
environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any
given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about
100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much
seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in
average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless
altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not
because of the facts

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are
just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in
their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think
it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was
addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that
they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those
days

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock
Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They
obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century.
Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses,
believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic
church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of
Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile,
mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by
non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This
contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel"
produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture
in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one
carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is
common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic
theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil),
which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes
and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to
exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil
layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the
only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great
expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far)
precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element
of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique
versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all,
in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the
atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all
other living things."

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the
atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores
is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient
account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of
280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of
compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. Perhaps the gas
content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr
Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core
measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30
years.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by
experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you
believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians,
nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers".
It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an"
could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed
holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household
items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays",
"might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global
cooling

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has
been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;
indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a
widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest"
which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself."
He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance
on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern
medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is
nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run
the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of
the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development
of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in
climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale
appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and
suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their
ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.
They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of
global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized
civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that
about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe
disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of
someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide
any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right
that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to
them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with
fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my
research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much
writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in
detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that
field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because
no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped
that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I
have shifted my attention to health related science and climate
related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic.
Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental
research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers
published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of
reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have
put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some
of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter.
Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular
bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only
because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is
reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global
warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It
seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in
global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics
or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future.
Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities
in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism
is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known
regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are
on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the
science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let
alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world.
Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a
scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to
be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be
none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions.
Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would
disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific
statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a
psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to
be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous
pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation
of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that
suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old
guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be
unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with
tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can
afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society
today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were.
But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that
seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count
(we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader
base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an
enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out
of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict
conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy
sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the
totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the
black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current
manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the
weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate
50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met
Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The
Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because
they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their
global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is
like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here)
that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative
donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they
agree with

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the
Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a
pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we
worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that
clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down
when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years
poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that
might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid
their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback
that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2
and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence
gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years
show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2
will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to
bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to
increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the
plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its
carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It
admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast
filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of
the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather
improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the
universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for
making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all
logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level
rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the
average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting
point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the
Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which
NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees.
So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And
the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not
raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of
Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the
water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated
it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with
that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The
whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening
of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen:
"We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of
decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very
partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw
data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that
it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones'
Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate
data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make
the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given
conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive
such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real
environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more
motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity
that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence
showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of
the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty
and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of
the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to
admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the
date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been
clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that
saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of
society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that
fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called
phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming
is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so
Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people
want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing
all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the
real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better
than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all
Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a
Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global
Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie
panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a
new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The
real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another
life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The
most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by
Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the
unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when
the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in
1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out.
Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually
better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that
we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism
is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note
also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably
well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming
denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it.
That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses
believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say
that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed --
and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when
people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as
too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy.
Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common
hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact
that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few
additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a
hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we
breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical
to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad
enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not
to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the
ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research
grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of
money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some
belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of
"The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked
event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist
instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without
material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such
people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example.
Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that
instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious
committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them
to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them
to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and
folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES
beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any
known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough
developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil
fuel theory

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this,
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light;
preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts
shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that
his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes
to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the
earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise
reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so
small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally
without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a
time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures
tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th
century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because
they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely.
But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern
hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the
world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is
claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since
seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to
even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility.
Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the
atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the
oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No
comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base
balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational
basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units
has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air
movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an
unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate
experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables
over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years
hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In
such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and
are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts
production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to
be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to
every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper
was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film.
It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account
fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is
nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a
Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven
climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of
the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the
paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in
recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie
mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that
reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented
July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even
have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact
that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving
into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got
the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The
modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by
Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the
number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an
acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient
between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was
doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green,
Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished
the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in
Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in
1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and
economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The
correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."
So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the
Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature
rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if
measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been
considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar
cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal
electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic
to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the
article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename
the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/